[b][url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG2McqTOItI]Elsewhere, Elsewhen...[/url][/b]

[indent]Upon a dark, silent strip of Los Angeles streets, [color=orange]Sarah King[/color] emerged from the narrow gap between rows of project houses. Sweating, she clung to the wall on the frontside of a small apartment building, and cut a glance back around the corner she had come from; through the tight window of the alleyway, she saw the flashes of red and blue come and go with the waxxing and waning of accompanying sirens. [color=orange][i]'Sigh.'[/i][/color] The breath released in a long, labored sustain as her back slid and scraped down the brick wall until she was properly seated upon the sidewalk. After checking the streets both ways, she drew down her hood and removed her ski mask, crumpling the latter into front pocket of her hoodie. With a half-laugh, half-cry, she tilted her head back and propped it against the wall behind her, and allowed the laughter to surrender itself to a sob that just barely broke the quiet of the predawn streets. 

There against the frontside of the tenement, she sat for a minute that quickly turned to five, fighting back the waterfall threatening to flow from behind her face. 

Pulling her sleeve to her face, she wiped herself clean, and rubbed her eyes clear. Remaining seated, she looked at her own hands. Callouses, both old and new, marked her palms. Her knuckles were still redened by blood from her prior night's activities. She listened back across the alleyway, wondering how close she had cut it... she didn't need the 5-0 getting their hands into her business; for all she knew, the LAPD had eighty-sixed Ken Shimazu themselves to keep some other age old scandal from breaking their ranks. Her body froze when Shimazu's name crossed her stream of thought. For a paralyzing second, the idea of simply not getting up again, of waiting on that sidewalk for death to take her, seemed preferrable to the weeks' long guantlet she had been running just to find her mentor's assassin. There might have been some solace in knowing she had already beaten the bastard underground [b]if[/b] she had known that's who was on the other end of her punches. 

[color=orange]"Sensei,"[/color] she mourned, looking up into the dark blue sky, [color=orange]"What the f*ck am I doing?"[/color] 

Her power of will came back to her in short order. Determining that wasting away on the sidewalk so close to home was no way for her to go, she rose to her feet, and began walking. No more than a mile up the road, the journey that had brought her to a cage match in Compton, and lead into a night of busting down safehouses around L.A., was coming back around to where it had started. The worst of it was that she was no further along on her crusade than when she had started. 

Depleted, muscles throbbing from overexertion, she stumbled into her apartment, only realizing after she had entered that the door had been unlocked ahead of her. Tired, but alert, she looked to the darkened space, and sensed a presence cloaked in the shadows just beyond her sight. She kicked the door closed behind her, and took a step into the apartment. What little energy she had left flowed out into her arms and legs, which flexed modestly, but visibly, beneath her clothes [color=orange]"Who else wants some?"[/color][/indent]