[color=#007FFF][b][u][h1][sub][sub][sub]Farren[/sub][/sub][/sub][/h1][/u][/b][/color]		    watched, listened, even sniffed at the air, but none of his efforts–nor those of the others–proved remotely effective. Worse still was the fact that somehow, despite his vigilance, [i]something[/i] truly frightening slipped past his guard–past all of their guards. Ophelia moved, sudden, but after a flash–a mere instant–it became abundantly clear that it was not of her own volition.

A wound split open in a single timeless moment and Farren’s eyes widened, but his hand was already moving.

He drew his Hunter’s Pistol, unable to see the threat, and trained it on Ophelia. Some might have panicked, might have wildly swung the weapon about, or twitched it between near-random points in their companion’s general direction.

Farren trained it on Ophelia herself, at the center of the wound, at the spray of blood that gushed from her form, at where the blood could not pass, but neither did it cling. Then his eyes shifted in a straight line back from the rift in her torso, through what his senses told him was empty air, along nothing at all. Farren, of course, had no idea what precisely was attacking Ophelia, no clue what its dimensions might be, so he shifted the muzzle of his firearm to a spot perhaps 2 meters back from Ophelia, keeping the weapon trained at a spot roughly the same elevation as the center of Ophelia’s wound.

Then he fired.