Episode: 3.10

--- Chess ---

Chess sighed rolling her own neck, not exactly comfortable with either having their connection strained, or letting Rai forcibly repress his Malice, though that didn’t mean she didn’t understand why he was doing it.

Giving the drones responsible a quick glare.

(Okay, let’s do this…)

Rolling her shoulders, she let the Malice in her veins bleed into the air around her, causing a slight static in the back of her head as her other-self began to passively manipulate the Malice to filter her out of most everyone’s range of perception.

Moving swiftly, she rushed forward, avoiding the crowd entirely even as Rai began lightly pushing his way through.

For a brief moment she dropped onto four before leaping onto the nearest Sanctuary truck, where she released a small pulse of Malice from her hands and feet to silence her landing.

“Deviant signature detected… Scanning area…” a mechanical voice announced.

Her eyes shot to a nearby surveillance drone as it began turning towards her.

“Hey, the suppression cuffs are in place, right?” the nearest soldier asked his white and black outfit shining in the sunlight as he fiddled with a device attached to his forearm.

“Should be.” A guard closer to the prisoners called back before crouching behind one of the prisoners.

“Eh, I’ll run a full spectrum scan just in case we missed one.” The soldier shrugged before messing with the drone’s controls.

(Okay. Inhale and hold…)

Slowly she breathed in, before holding her breath, as she warped the Malice in her body, twisting its signature as the static in her head became a near all-consuming buzz.

Eventually she felt the shift as her the world around her slowly distorted, an enhanced version of her perception filter warping the very reality around her to the point where even Rai, who knew all of her tricks, couldn’t detect her if he tried… something she tried very hard to ignore.

(3 minutes, 26 seconds remaining…)

A whirring sound came from both surveillance drones as they slowly spun through the air spun, listing a different spectrum with each spin, “No Electromagnetic anomalies detected… No residual Mana detected… No Psion discrepancies detected… No Ectoplasmic radiation detected…”

(Next should be Malice, here’s hoping Rai can keep his suppression up…)

Her eyes, drifted to her brother, her worry building as the drone seemed to take just a bit longer to process its final scan.

“No Malice distortions detected… Resuming patrol protocols.” the drones announced before drifting through the air once more, causing her to release a subtle sigh.

(2 minutes, 54 seconds remaining…)

“Eh, must’ve been the cuffs,” a third soldier commented, sounding older than the others, “they’ll sometimes set the drones off when you put them on the more unstable Deviants.”

“Is that what that flash of light is?” the guard asked.

Using their conversation as an opening, she leapt off the truck and made her way behind the guards and prisoners.

(Standard suppression cuffs… shouldn’t be too hard to remove.) she thought to herself as she subtly reached for the cuffs lock with her tail.

“Yeah,” the older soldier nodded “they don’t put it in the manual, freaked me out first time I saw it, thought the Deviant was trying to escape, ended up shooting the thing.”

“What happened?” a guard on the other side of the prisoners asked.

“Eh, it was just a Deadman,” the soldier shrugged “Since I didn’t kill it my squad leader told me to at least aim for the head next time if I was going to waste the bullets.”

“Yeah, you’d think they’d put more of the budget on ammo wouldn’t you.”

(Disgusting…)

Her eyes jumped between the soldiers, her teeth itching and her fingertips burning as she felt an instinctive need to leap at them and rip out their racist throats.

(No…)

She shook her head, to forcibly calm her other-self’s irritation.

(Need to stay calm, like Rai said we can’t afford to bring any heat to our own neighborhood…)

Her tail twitched as she felt the last tumbler about to give.

(2 minutes, 29 seconds remaining…)

For a brief moment she sent out a small pulse of Malice to reconnect her pack bond before sending a simple pulse of [Opportunity] and suppressing the connection once more.

For a brief moment all of the drones seemed to pause picking up the subtle use of her Malice, but before they could alert the guards to their scanning several voices cried out from the crowd, as number of people fell down in a large heap, drawing the attention of the Sanctuary soldiers away from both the drones and their prisoners.

Taking advantage of her brother’s distraction, she lunged forward clamping a hand over the mouth of Deviant in front of her, a lightly tanned brown-haired woman in her mid-twenties.

“Stay still and be quiet, I’m about to undo the locks on your cuffs…” She whispered to the woman, knowing her voice had a slight echo to it from the filter keeping the guards from hearing her, as well as the extra bits of Malice for her Persuasion and the filter that kept the drones from picking it up.

“They can’t hear me, but they can hear you, when I take my hand off tell me your Deviancy in three words, can you do that?”

The woman looked at the nearby guards who were watching the other guards sort out the mess in the crowd, before nodding, as Chess removed her hand.

The woman gave the guards one more anxious look before tilting her head down and telling her, “Nature. Ritualist. D.” in whispered voice.

(A medicine woman, of fucking course…)

She barely resisted the urge to snarl at the soldiers arresting what amounted to a home-remedy doctor.

(And if she’s a D-rank Ritualist then she can’t use her magic, and she’s no help in an actual fight…)

“Are you a part of the association?” she tried, after all she had a few friends she could pull a favor with depending on the woman’s answer.

“The association?” Medicine woman asked her voice barely a whisper.

(And she doesn’t know about the Arcane Association…)

She gnawed on her lip at that revelation.

(Given her rank that might help her in this situation, but unless the other two are the same then she’ll be screwed over for being arrested with them…)

“That doesn’t matter right now…” she finally answered, “I’m going to move on to the others, don’t move until we give the signal, understood?”

The woman nodded once more, before briefly glancing behind her, likely trying to get a look at her rescuer, (for all the good it would do trying to spot an A-Rank Infiltrator.)

(1 minute 57 seconds remaining…)

She shook her head at her other-side’s reminder, before getting back to work as she moved onto the last two prisoners and freed them in the same way and with the same questions as she had the medicine woman.

----

(This is such bullshit…)

This time she didn’t bother suppressing her growl as she leapt away from the last prisoner.

Something scratched at the back of her head, trying to get past the static in her head, causing her to instinctively turn towards a tree a fair distance away from the soldiers.

It didn’t even take her a full second to spot her brother standing beneath it, and it took her even less time to begin making her way to him, letting her perception filter fall, hoping she could still make use of what little power she had left given her restrictions.

She tried to ignore the growing migraine said power was beginning to bring her.

(Really wish I didn’t have to suppress my Malice… The healing factor would really come in handy right now.)

“Well, what are we dealing with?” Rai asked when she was within range, his eyes taking in every bit of information he could about the scene in front of them.

[Disgust] [Irritation]

“A D-rank Nature-Ritualist, a C-rank Dream-walker, and the third guy isn’t even a Deviant…” she explained, her pulsing emotions.

Rai ran a hand through his hair feeling her frustrations, both figuratively and literally, “So, three non-combatants…”

“Yep.”

His eyes flashed black with two pinprick white pupils as he once more scanned the whole scene as he tried to come up with an alternate plan, to their now borderline useless one.

Seeing him taking a moment to think, she went ahead and leaned against the tree next to him.

A sigh finally escaped him as his eyes returned to their usual silvery grey as he ran his hand through his hair once more. “You sure there’s no way to convince you to just leave these people?”

She crossed her arms with a glare, “Not happening Rai.”

She sent another pulse of [Irritation] just to emphasis the point.

“Of course, not…” he scoffed, voice low enough that a human wouldn’t have caught it, “we can’t take the easy way, now can we?”

She scowled, before using what Malice she could afford to shut down her resentment for that statement, after all she understood where he was coming from, he just wanted to protect her and his family, no matter the cost or morality.

A fairly Malcontent mentality all things considered, she knew her personality was more of an outlier as far as Malcontent went, though (sometimes I wonder if he realizes that out of all our family, he’s the one whose human half acts the most like a Malcontent’s other-self…)

“How much longer can you keep up your filter?” Rai cut into her musings.

(43 seconds remaining; increasing by 1 second every minute…)

“Not even a full a minute.” She sighed.

His eyes roamed over everything once more, not even bothering to use Malice to speed up his perception this time, then again, he was probably already getting a Malice migraine what with his low concentrate and all.

(This would’ve been so much easier if he was still in top form, we could’ve just done a smash and grab, spiriting them away so fast Sanctuary wouldn’t know what hit them.)

That thought made her pause.

And a little more thought made her nod.

“Hey, Rai, expand parameters.”

Her twin turned to her with a raised brow.

[Query] (Huh?)

She sent him a string of pulses through their pack bond, these ones a good deal more complex than their usual emotional imprints.

[Adjustments] [Primary Objective: 2] [Secondary Objective: 1] [Parameter: New Objective] (Adjust parameters, remove the frame job, replace it with territory redirection.)

She figured that would be enough for him to figure out something good, after all while he was better at planning than her, he did have a tendency to become to locked on his goals, rather than giving himself wiggle room to compromise when those goals became too difficult.

(But that’s what I’m here for.)

Rai turned back to the scene in front of them, a grin slowly spreading across, not even needing his enhanced mental perception to figure it out.

“Oh… that’s a much better idea.” He practically purred in delight.

She shrugged, “Still need to pull it off.”

“Yeah, no, I’ve got that covered.” He waved her off with a manic grin.

She had to force herself not to point out just how excited Rai was at the prospect of using his powers so soon after their last outing.