[h3]Stalker[/h3]

Inside the bank, Stalker found herself in a bit of a predicament, namely that there was currently a fire-arm pointed at her head.

Things had been going so well too up until this point. Well. At least as well as could be hoped given the situation. 

The Tirmin ship’s Scavengers had broken into some sort of waste water transportation system first as they dug towards the surface, then found smaller tubes containing a seemingly infinite supply of drinking water to tap into, solving the most urgent crisis that had been facing them. Then they'd found a way up to the surface and found it teaming with local life, which surely meant that there must be an overwhelming amount of food available to feed them all.

Stalker's task them was simply to infiltrate the local's society and figure out how to get herself access to their distribution network.

To this end, she began observing the local population, walking among them without much issue baring 3 incidents with the high speed machines that seemed to dominate the travel arteries of this settlement.

They didn’t seem very safe, and she had decided she did not like them nor their toxic stink.

She also didn’t appreciate being screeched at by all the locals either, be it after the vehicle incidents, when she’d emerged from the wastewater system access hatch, or when she’d attempted to acquire an edible pink flesh tube in a processed cereal grain container for sustenance. 

This latter incident she had at least worked out why she’d gotten screeched at, as it seemed that the locals did something with metal disks, fabric slips, and/or plastic rectangles after the food was handed over, and that the distributor had not taken kindly to her not partaking in this act, resulting in her losing most of the food during the third vehicle incident when she'd made her escape. In an-attempt to prevent this occurring again she’d attempted to interact with wall mounted machines which others got the slips from, but to no avail. The local symbology was as entirely meaningless to her as their screeching and salt smell method of communication.

Refusing to get disheartened, she’d tracked down another source of the objects needed to acquire local food. It was a large building in which some locals screeched at other locals who sat behind glass booths, and began observing to see if she could figure out how to get some of those paper slips.

Unfortunately, she’d done so in a way that the locals did not seem to like, and had been in the middle of being screeched at by one strong looking one when said one’s cloth garments burst into flames.

As he rolled around on the ground screeching and ripping the garments off, she beheld the source of the flame. It was hard to miss, given that it consisted of a local who’s eyes, hair, and one arm were engulfed in it, and yet despite this did not seem to be suffering harm at all.

The burning being pointed one of its fiery arms at her as it approached, and here, at least, the signal was clear. If she moved, she was going to suffer the same fate as the local who had just been harassing her.

What followed was incredibly confusing to the disguised alien, but not to people who kept up with the local cape scene. The notorious PyroJack, serial superpowered arsonist, had subdued the small bank’s guards via severe burns (they had been rushed to hospital), and then taken a young woman who’d been distracting the guards (perhaps intentionally, or so some of the rumors went) in a headlock. With a threatening fist of flame pointed at her head, he had then induced the people in the bank to build him a bonfire of all the loose bills in the building, entirely for his own pyromaniac amusement, the smoke billowing out of a shattered skylight. 

The police had made a cordon and brought in a hostage negotiator, but given the ongoing riot, it was heavily undermanned and was mostly preventing people going in the front door. The windows and smoke filled skylight meanwhile where wide open.

What was unusual about the incident was the fact that every single camera pointed at it displayed static at best, or simply crashed at worst, which was making getting a clear picture of what was going on incredibly difficult. Rumor and hearsay where abound, some of it tying back to a string of strange incidents in the area supposedly involving the hostage in question, and claims that the she did not looked scared for her life, but instead merely increasingly annoyed by the situation.