Scene #9311: First Impressions Count As Throwing Weapons

Owner	Pose
Natsuki Nuki	The Shrine of Adversity was a marvel of the Multiverse, a location attached by high speed rail the Grand Dorado metropolis open to the public. Crossing the distance via train or arriving by dedicated gate or air travel, the grandly deluxe stadium evoked a hundred apexal monuments to conquest. Statues of notable combatants, archways that were themselves muraled with art, throughfares lined with accessories and accoutrement shops, and the sheer presence of people in constant sound and shift of color and motion give the Shrine a personality that changes during its 'on' and 'off' seasons. Right now, it's 'off' season, frequented like a celebrity gym and exhibition grounds of the powerful to get their swell on and their flex off, with a tidy betting circuit and performance schedule of martial sports filling up the contest space. The private arenas are where Igon is ''invited'' to, allowed to wander until he finds or asks a concierge for help finding the particular set of broad doors into his appointment. The customizable room within has already been fully detailed, and so opening it is the same as walking out into a vaguely familiar vista. Built in the image of a place in The Land Between, the entrance to the illusion is set into the side of a stone outpost tower wall, the crumble of weathered stones slumping to one side and a short path up on cracked wooden steps to a short parapet. Filled with a thin cover of dry grasses and aged patches of burlap that once had been bags for supplies or anything else, the shelter and service of the place had long since expired - now just a texture piece anchoring a corner of an arena. Down a slope, the gentle incline the tower had been put on winds down to an ancient fort set at the foot of a sloped hill. One side of the wall, which would have abutted a slope no greater than about ten degrees has instead been swallowed by a great spill of earth down from hills above, mud and rocks having spilled down into the lowlands during some storm of antiquity and turning once high stone into a retaining wall for a mound of clay and sod that spreads grass and dandelions on once-proud groutworks. Evoking 'abandoned to time', the location could have been cut right out of a world... If it was real. Sitting at the edge of a stone well, Natsuki Nuki sits, right ankle atop opposite knee, looking down at her charm-jangling flip phone and awaiting her '''date''' for the evening. As she is, Natsuki is a roughly 5'9" Osakan Japanese woman with her mid-length platinum blonde hair tied back into a ponytail that's breached by two tiger ears atop her head. Her face has an eyemask pattern that bridges over her nose of dark brown, and two red eyes with vertical slit-pupils that gawk at the idiocy of someone texting her. This gawking is shared by the black serpent escaping her back to coil about arm and peer at screen as well. Wearing a charcoal grey button-down shirt with the top three buttons open and a red tie as equally unkempt, over a black pleated skirt her serpentine tail escapes out the back of, she's set a white puffer jacket dangling in gold charms atop a road sign nearby while awaiting her plus one.
Igon	The air tastes wrong. Not like rot or poison. No. Like memory bent slightly out of joint. Like something pretending to be home. Igon crosses the illusion's parapet with the caution of a beast entering a den it once died in. He does not look at the terrain. He does not test the earth beneath his feet. It is false. All of it. And that is fine. False places still echo with real screams. At the bottom of the slope she waits. Natsuki Nuki. Silver and black. Ears of the predator. Eyes like polished coin, red and unblinking. The serpent coiled about her arm does not concern him. It confirms what he already knows. She is Bayle. Not in form. Not in fire. But in spirit. In the quiet, cruel composure that only a god of endings could wear so lightly. This is refinement. He does not stride. He advances. One step at a time. Not cautious. Intentional. Like each motion is a line being carved into fate itself. He speaks when he is near enough that silence would be surrender. Bayle is not clever enough to mimic style. Not like this. No. This is not mimicry. Lies! Tricks of Bayle. He must not be deceived by such a form. She is possessed by Bayle. And if she is not possessed, then she is something far worse: a mouth that speaks in Bayle's tone. And if she is not a mouth that speaks in Bayle's tone, then perhaps she is a willing ear for Bayle's whispers. And should she not be a desirous ear, then she may still be Bayle's foul snout. Igon stands just above average height but carries himself like someone taller, like gravity tilts toward him out of respect or wariness. His build is wiry, lean muscle drawn tight across a frame shaped by hardship and constant readiness. Nothing about him is ornamental. Everything serves purpose. Scars peek through the fraying edges of cloth and leather, most notably the darkened communion burns that spiral from his throat down across his collarbone like veins lit by memory instead of blood. A black cloth mask is tied over the lower half of his face, bandanna-style, its weave sun-bleached and battle-worn. It moves subtly when he speaks, concealing expression but not intensity. His hair is long, pulled back in irregular ties, streaked with ashen gray not from age but from something more elemental, something earned. The top half of his face, exposed and angular, is framed by sharp cheekbones and shadowed eyes that flicker like coals behind cracked glass. His gaze is steady, unwavering, but never comfortable. "You are Bayle. You must be. The way the light bends around you. The calm. I see it now. I see it. This is how he would walk in flesh not his own."
Natsuki Nuki	Had she the insight into Igon's particular thought processes, Natsuki might be flattered or frustrated. Of debatable fortune, she cannot gain such clear reads on the knight from a distance by doing nothing. A faint breeze, simulated as it must be, but with every feeling of the real rolls down the incline and over the hill, shifting soft grasses in a susurrating wave of single blades caught in the wind. The low rush-sound of carries the mid-spring scent of grass pollen and damp earth and the dust of sun-scored stone, and does nothing to hide the deliberate intent that Igon stalks forward in. Natsuki, who has been waiting for a short while now, had picked the surrounds to work with the knight's aesthetic. Her faint hope was by the time of the fight that Igon would have caught some flavor of sense or waved off with some face-saving motion. It would be easier, on her. 'Easier', though, wasn't the particular emotion she craved. Bloody closure was what she had hoped to attain in the hot moment of emotions now a week back, and stewing in her frustration had given her no functional peace. Shouldn't she have made it? Was her attainment so damnably conditional? Was this just one more fool on the path that she had to entertain? Entertainment. It boiled her blood to 'entertain' this, to have to play nice with some shouting fool that didn't know better. Shouldn't someone else handle this? Street gang nonsense was having to hit someone to prove a point. And here she was. Downright pastoral! Lifting a finger from braced against the back to close her flip phone a few beats and thumb-clicks from the ear-flick that catches Igon's presence, Natsuki's unimpressed stare begins at quirked brow when she's addressed - expectant, considering. 'You are Bayle. You must be.' The interest dies on Natsuki's face, brows dropping to an annoyed pair of inward slants. "I'm not going to start with 'the fuck does that mean', because I know what that fucking means." Are the first real words she shares back with the scarred knight, setting her phone besides her on the edge of the well. Closing hand around the edge of the well, Natsuki's platinum bangs drift with the tilt of her chin. "Enemy. Your enemy, specifically. I thought you'd like a little taste of home! I should have set us up in a bar or a sauna, then I'd at least enjoy my time waiting for you." The tiger-eared woman continues, unfolding her legs and standing up with a forward-rocking bounce. "Let's start with introductions, then. My name is Natsuki. Now," Planting left hand on hip while pointing a black-nailed finger at Igon, Natsuki re-quirks a brow. "Pick your weapon or apologize, Igon the Drake Warrior. That's how this works, right? Matters of honor?" Her tone is an angry accusatory.
Igon	Igon stands still a moment too long. The wind picks up around his boots, dragging dust across the false stones and brushing the hem of his coat with just enough delicacy to make the silence feel intentional. "Apologize," he repeats, like tasting a word that does not fit in his mouth. "Matters of honor." He doesnt move yet. Doesnt draw. His voice is quiet, but it has the rhythm of someone talking to spectres. "Bayle never spoke of honor. Bayle devoured it. Bayle made games of pain, never rules. Bayle did not ask names. Bayle did not wait. Bayle burned cities before the bells could finish ringing." A pause. Something shaped like hesitation, even as he reaches for his greatbow. "What trickery do you intend?"
Natsuki Nuki	Natsuki holds her posture, staring, pointing. Her right eye twitches with the faintest muscular motion around the lid. The accusing finger pointed towards Igon holds with just the faintest of tension-wavers. Then her lips part and her tone is all-attitude with the drawl of her all-feeling question: "Haaaaaaaaahn?" Natsuki's wrist comes up and pointing finger curls in while her lips sneer around the note. Her face holds look for a moment more, and then a scowl, and then an animated shift through wide-eyed (anger? confusion) to dull dismissal to a smeared-into-shape neutrality by the sweep of her palm and fingers bridging temples down the sides of her cheeks. "You must be a real foreign kind of different." Natsuki drawls, a country sort of accent sliding into what she had originally tried to put refinement on. "Honor! The trickery I have planned is that you're going to show up and learn why you should respect me. The whole thing we agreed to do!" As if realizing she might be talking to someone who has no idea what they agreed to do, Natsuki lets her arms fall to her sides and flop back to seated against her well, serpentine tail clearly agitated by this development and nearly being sat on. Angrily looking up at Igon while tasting the air, her tail continues to stare while Natsuki's eyes roll and she fills in what she imagines are the blanks. "That respect you demanded I earn on the radio, what you gave out to Petra for nothing but 'oh it's a special secret' and told people to ignore me. So, what's it going to take? I can do clubs or axes or fists, but not swords." Eyes lifting from checking nails and testing point with thumb to look at the darkly considering knight, Natsuki asides almost-conversationally: "Not a swords kind of girl. If we're just playing impale-each-other's-chest I bet I can win so let's get it over with."
Igon	Igon watches her speak like he is watching fire crackle in the shape of a woman, waiting for the moment it turns into a scream. Her words roll past him, tonal shifts and sneers and half-spoken invitations to violence, and he takes them all in with the brittle stillness of a man trying not to blink in front of a dream that has started to blur at the edges. She is mocking him. She is not Bayle. She cannot be? But then again, is that not exactly what Bayle would do? Pretend to be less. Shrink into something manageable. Disguise annihilation as irritation. Speak with the voice of a tired, comely woman when once he heard that voice crack mountains. Igon's hand flexes once on the grip of his greatbow. Then he lowers it. Not fully. Just enough to mean something. "You speak like you bleed boredom," he says, voice low, steady. "You laugh where there should be silence. You roll your eyes like the sky has not cracked beneath your might. I should strike now. I should put a harpoon through the lie and let the truth writhe free of your ribs."
Natsuki Nuki	Natsuki had expected something, and she's clearly not getting it. Figuring out what she's getting in the alternative had become her task that she was now pawing at annoyedly, spiteful at having to work this hard. Igon's accusations have just enough poetry to them that Natsuki listens to the whole part of it before starting her response, hooked into interested listening until the directed 'should' statement. "Right now I would bleed boredom, Igon, that's the thing." Natsuki chuffs, head shaking while her eyes track the knight. Saccade motion shifts from face to the creak of greatbow, and then back, smirking. "The sky and I are acquainted--" Overhead, on clear day, the sky sours in deep discontent. The pressure to the air increases, scents as a storm, and rumbles with krr-kathoom! of distant disaster. Spilling, spoiling above in a soup that blots out the false sun from falling on the grass in an illusion of home, the perfectly-timed peal gives eerie harmony to Natsuki's statement. "--on more than speaking terms, but you know what?" Standing again, Natsuki takes a full step forward, inside Igon's reach, looking up while arms outstretch, welcoming, goading. "It's because I know I have to make this good for you!" Mirthless 'amusement' drips from her tone, affected-sweet. "Not just good for me, oh no. I can't curse you to agonizing silence, or rip your throat out for what you said about me, so I have to stand here and get you to respect me, or use stronger medicine." "So take your stab. Rip open my chest and see what writhes free, if you'll be civil afterwards. If that's what it takes." A beat, and then hot breath, agitated to surety. "Go ahead. I'll show you my 'civil side', too."
Igon	The storm cracks overhead, and Igon does not flinch. Of course the sky answers her. Of course the world bends around her posture and her voice. Bayle always commanded weather like it was a loyal dog, and here it comes again, summoned by spite and spectacle. She is inside his reach now. Arms open. Daring him. Daring herself. And the worst part is, he does not want to strike. Not yet. "You do not speak like Bayle," he says. The voice is quieter now. It has lost none of its heat, but it carries something rawer beneath it. Something closer to want. "You speak like someone who would rather bleed than be ignored. Someone who would cut open their chest to make sure the world sees the right shape inside." He lifts the harpoon. Not in threat. In recognition. "And maybe you are not Bayle. Maybe you are what Bayle wishes it could have been. Beautiful. Angry. Refusing to break quietly." A breath. "And if that is true, then I owe you more than war. I owe you clarity." And so he readies for combat. To test. To see if she means it. To see if she will meet him in the place between fury and faith, where pain stops being metaphor and becomes communion. Because this is not just a fight. This is the only kind of honesty Igon knows how to give.
Natsuki Nuki	It's not just a storm, but an island storm. A different character of wetness than from over the plains or hills. The air wets and becomes heavy, friction gives the whole of it a charge like a tropical storm pressing against shoreline. The clouds overhead roll like misery escaping containment, painting grey and turquoise and slate across what had once been sunny hillside. This is one aspect of the 'simulation', the real-feeling soil that shifts under boot and the earthen scent that rises from the patter of first raindrops that fall over the darkening ground, that might feel too-real, or simply be missed as true. Awareness of the trick does not reveal seam or flaw in the construction of things like stone and wood buildings or the simple physics and geology of objects in space. It is as if the village and the small keep were real - as real as the storm that falls into its arms as poured and heavy gas. The great expense paid to the Shrine of Adversity's construction can be 'felt' this way. And, an aspect of Natsuki can as well: As a particular character of weather, locational, a storm of or at least from a place. "Of course I don't speak like Bayle!" Natsuki fumes, brows down and tight, looking at-and-through the knight. Perhaps, if she addresses Bayle they'll get it! "And I'm so glad you've finally listened! It's why we're here, isn't it?!" It's a question, in her challenge, to the shape behind Igon, to the theater of Bayle. Perhaps if she could conjure them out of anger, then the whole of the problem would be settled! And yet she doesn't want to take the easy way of understanding. She had come all this way, set up, to settle this the permanent way. Goading someone that's armored, agitated, and intentful was a challenge. Walking into reach is a challenge. Arms out is a challenge. And-- Natsuki hears the word 'beautiful', caught in the moment, and it's visible how she stops and reconsiders everything in that flash of a moment. Eyes open, soften, consider, recall the words around it-- And then more anger. "Oi, oi, oi!!! Beautiful's right," Her flow is confused, the compliment having brought her up and then she had to remember she was livid, and the lividity and preening compete between each other. 'I owe you', as a trade-out, almost quenches her whole stormhead of a mood (literal, figurative) when Igon begins it, and then he offers 'clarity' and readies for combat. ". . ." Natsuki stares, dark-ringed eyes narrowing and focusing, as she takes a step back, arm behind her. "Yeah. 'Break, quietly'. Was that what you wanted? Was IT?!" The anger boils over, her bad mood linking thought to action and backstepping with a dirt-clod scattering force to reach for the chain still attached to the well behind her, yanking the length free and whipping it out forcefully in a low-telegraph sweep, and backswings just as fast, heaving splinters and wood on the end of the chain like a long and awkward flail of high danger.
Igon	The chain smashes into him. The storm exhales. Igon does not move until the wind parts around him, rain on his shoulders like oil over fire. His half-mask is streaked with water. The light shimmers across the dark grain of the harpoon in his hand. "You think I wanted you to break quietly?" His voice is sharp. Not loud. But it carries, slicing the air between them like something thrown before it is sharpened. "No. Never. I wanted you to break like mountains break. Like old gods crumbling beneath new names. Loud. Defiant. Full of meaning." He steps once, bracing. The greatbow groans as he pulls it open, the spine of the weapon flexing like something alive, something wounded. "Give me the scream. The one you've been choking back behind laughter and insults. Show me the truth of your storm. Not the face. The core." He fires. The harpoon looses with a sound like tearing scripture, air bent and split by a bolt of bone and hatred. "SHOW ME YOUR POWER!"
Natsuki Nuki	The wood at the end of Natsuki's well-chain flail crashes into Igon's unmoving defense and it shares more in common with the break of wind than with any sort of weapon. Metal sparks and rattles, a loud susurration while the chain travels, and Natsuki's eyes reflect the orange and the yellows of the dancing-marks of impact without moving from Igon's expression. Did he mean that? Break her, quietly? Natsuki had seen the greatbow across Igon's ready, and the lance-like harpoon she had calculated would be the knight's defensive measure. An outrageous club or spear held at ready when she closed -- denying the obvious archer their bow-bending. However, her blows barely startle Igon and certainly don't send him back, so raising her fist at the end of her backswing, the end of the chain rotates at a whipping rattle around the close of her right fist and forearm. "Never?! You've got a funny way of showing that, metal man!" Natsuki challenges, almost a threat, over a distant rumble of electrical discharge in the sky above. "You pick fights just to see what people will do?!" She asks, challenges, spreading wider her stance and holding left hand open and out while chain-wrapped right closed and close - watching. There's an awareness in her, a trained hang as she stares down the line of Igon's arrow, arm, fingers, eyes, waiting for a single twitch. Quickdraw with a loaded, levelled weapon. "Well. I don't know if I hate that." Natsuki admits, far lower, conversational, fingers at a slight curl in. Igon looses his hellish harpoon of an 'arrow' and Natsuki finally jinks, moving in a misty haze around the sky-splitting arc of the shot. In a single instant, the harpoon rips across Natsuki's right side, checking-and-guiding the arc away from centerline by smashing the tip of it just before connection with her readied chained fist. The sheer spin she gains from the imparted impact sends the harpoon curving around her back with a whip of platinum blonde. Forced back in her spin either way, Natsuki scoops up two of the wellstones and lunges closer, zigging once to foul a bow draw and throwing one of her two masonry at Igon's knuckles holding the greatbow's fore while she closes with the other to smash into his face. And all the while Igon is shouting about her power! "My scream's not just for you, not just for anyone who asks!" Wild eyed, close again, brick turning to powder as she wilds it. "But if you want a taste, as a special request, I'll give it to you!!" The whole of her crackles. For a moment, it is as if raw electricity and only the vaguest sense of a shape shifted in silhouette around her, and then she was it, and then she makes a noise like one more of her questions at a volume used by atmospheric events several thousand feet in the sky. In other words: She does not strike Igon with lightning. Lighting occurs, forms naturally, directly adjacent to him and seeks a grounding in a deafening cacophony.
Igon	The thunderbolt doesn't strike Igon so much as declare that it has already arrived, a pressure front of raw sound and current that reduces air to plasma and leaves his senses scrambling for purchase. Igon's body blooms with arcs of desperate lightning, conductive seams grounding surges into the dirt, heat vents popping open with bursts of steam. The greatbow jerks in his grip, filaments overloading, and for a moment even his unyielding frame is forced back a half-step, boots digging deep furrows in the scorched ground. His aim recalibrates wildly before re-centering on the crackling, fire-veined blur of Natsuki still surging in. Her hair dances like live wire. Her breath fogs and glows. Her chain wraps and unwraps in a pattern of trained chaos. She breathes in gasps that steam like iron into ice, breath glowing faintly blue with sheer kinetic bleedoff. Her eyes dont blink. "Accursed, beautiful Natsuki," he growls, one eye narrowed against the smoke trailing from his own chest, the other wide as a prophet seeing fire rain from heaven. The greatbow creaks as he hauls the limbs apart, sparks flying from the tension winding through every fiber of the weapon. He begins to load the harpoon, not with speed, but ritual. The weapon groans like it does not want to be fired again so soon. But Igon compels his only true companion to obey his will. "You are not a shadow. I mistook you for a lie, but you are truth made ruinous. You are the sound a cathedral makes when it crumbles into the sea." He breathes in. He draws the string fully back, metal whining with the effort, and the harpoon tip flares red-hot, seething with volatile pressure. His aim centers not on her body, but on her storm, as if trying to pin the impossible. He draws the string fully back, metal whining with the effort, and the harpoon tip flares red-hot, seething with volatile pressure. His aim centers on her. The harpoon howls as it leaves the bow, the air splitting like a hymn torn from a martyrs throat, leaving behind a streak of battle-drunk madness.
Natsuki Nuki	Natsuki is brilliantly bright for a moment, light and energy manifest. What brings back the woman in the storm is the praise of form and the faint notes of understanding in pain. She is not an unthinking, unseeing, unknowing beast, circling for the kill with or without smile. Instead, Natsuki began this whole fight out of wounded pride and knowing that she had to enforce her voice or be silent in the most simple sense. Igon being more than 'good for the fight' is quite a bit more than added benefit. Natsuki's assult, paused by being called beautiful and then accursed in that order, earns Igon a drawing moment of the Osakan woman's shape walking from lightning-lines in full red-eyed smirk. "You noticed? I think it's your whole problem in the first place!" Natsuki declares, tone instructive, one hand atop hip and the other pointed straight out and led with pointing finger and cocked up thumb. Fingergunning against the greatbow - or Igon's insinuation, or just the pausing praise, Natsuki winks. "Because I am both beautiful, and accursed! Did you mis-take me for another malediction, Igon?" She asks, showy while the knight works his weapon with the great, terrible protest. Out from behind her, the coil of black tail spreads out in a hissing challenge of its own, serpent's eyes fixed upon the bow and not the wielder. Knowing she can't grandstand when his harpoon is loaded, Natsuki shifts swiftly from her challenging strut to a single loping step and then lunges up into the air to land at Igon, on the greatbow, challenging the unmoving knight before the protesting harpoon can be launched. She rears back, steadied on the planted weapon, and her once-cattily gesturing fingers warp and shift as she draws a limb back. Peeling like a wrapper and molting open and not leaving a skin behind, Natsuki's arm reveals itself as an entirely different shape, undefinite before knuckles, thumb, and trunk-thick arm wrapped in black fuzz. She's right about to throw a massive black gorilla-armed punch right for Igon's face to follow up the brick with a haymaker of stiffer means when the knight's harpoon-aim lifts vertical with blazing tip and launches skyward and stormbound. Natsuki is carried like that, burned more than she is shot, as she loses her footing instantly and is lost with the harpoon into the storm. In one instant, her chimeric limb is about to cross-counter the archer, and then there's a frame like lightningflash of her eyes wide and her whole body smearing about the sudden force, surprised he drew and fired on her faster than she could expect, and then she is gone. The impossible wish, to pin a storm to the sky, would normally, generally, be impossible. One did not shoot harpoons at clouds and expect to stick them to God's indoor wall. One did that normally outside. Neither Igon, nor Natsuki, are outside. They are inside a very accurate simulation, and, Natsuki brought all of this storm with her: it's her storm. At the center of the storm is a great storming mass, a thick cloudhead that is pinned butterflylike to the interior roof of the skybox overhead, opening a hole in the cloudcover that the whole storm seems to follow, pinching and deforming the weather effect like a cloth folding around the pin placed in it. Natsuki, thrown hundreds of feet into the sky, gains air control of herself and rotates enough to crash into the skybox herself harmlessly. Falling immediately, the air control doesn't quite stick with her. Equally as surprised at this, it is the storm pinned to the skybox that struggles to reach its master, yanking the way air might against a solid thing, all crackle and whisper and breath and nothing as solid as a rod of metal and as insistent as a burning tip. So Natsuki just falls, and falls, and falls, and crashes down again on the ground, a sprawl of unwrapped limbs for a moment. "You shot a storm?!" She asks, incredulous.
Igon	Igon is still on one knee, steam pouring from the mouth of the greatbow like it has just spoken a name it was never meant to know. His hair clings to his face in wet cords, and his mask is cracked down one cheek, barely holding together. His hands are blackened. Burnt. Gripping the weapon like it might fly away without him. "You brought the storm," he says, hoarse, looking up through the haze with eyes that still shine like fire reflected in broken armor. "You brought it here. You wore it. You made it sing." He staggers upright, swaying slightly, harpoon socket glowing red-hot. "So I shot it." A single, ragged bark of laughter. He is bleeding from the mouth. He does not care. He smiles with perfect hatred. Not the hatred of rage. Not the hatred of weakness. The hatred of recognition. The hatred reserved for something so brilliant, so worthy, so blinding in its clarity that the only sane response is to try to destroy it before it changes you. "You danced in the thunder like it was a crown," he says, each word dragging pain from somewhere deep inside his ribs. "Do you know what it means," he spits, "to believe someone could be Bayle? Not just the enemy. But the enemy beneath all enemies. The shape in the dark under everything." His eyes burn. His voice cracks. He stands now, above her crater, above the sprawl she left on the earth. Still bleeding. Still laughing. Still grinning with purest madness. Yet he does not finish the thought. Igon seems content to be in his own world of blood and hate. "Ah ha ha ha! Perhaps we could offer each other an accord? And I, an apology to you?"
Natsuki Nuki	Haze shifts, shapes settle, and Natsuki ceases to be fully draped in atmospheres and dust. Shaking her head out and wiping thick fingers through her hair to brush back bangs and tousle up across her head and back. Her hand continues back past her orange-fringed and dark tufted ears. She waits, and there's none of that creaking of another shot, and instead laughing. So Natsuki thunks back on the ground and puffs out a few breaths in a mixture of exasperation, annoyance, and relief. Stopping short was always anticlimax that had to be fought against, a choice every time that needed a mutuality to it. A shared understanding. For the time that Igon laughs and merrymakes, Natsuki stares at the blackened-chested and smoking Igon and takes the measure of his decision. This time, it breaks right? Well, enough for the nue to scoff and exhale the held breath. "It's because I bring it everywhere, Igon, nue are storm-heralds. Terrible, disastrous weather, fit to pitch cities to mud and scattered stones." Drooping, deflating a little, Natsuki rolls to a seat, and then knuckles up to standing. "So you shot it. What a damned lunatic." She agrees, in general tone. "'Striking like lightning' is a part of my legend, too, the one I'm keeping on adding ink too. But crowned, well, I like that better." She appreciates, and takes the hatred in the same pace as a smile. "I knew what it meant, Igon." She frowns. "That you kept calling me the same name as your greatest enemy. I knew what it meant for me - which was, as your compatriot, to make sure you understood that I wasn't the curse you were looking for!" Scoffing, like it's obvious, Natsuki heads over, closing the few paces before seeing the level of damage and bleeding. "Oh, jeez, do you normally get this fried? The safeties usually kick in pretty far before lethal. You must have a lot of blood to lose it like that!" Offering a hand, palm up, as if to grasp arm or take hand or any number of arrangements, Natsuki's smells the burn in the air and her smirk becomes tighter. "You can offer an apology, sure, but I'm not looking for a one and done - I was looking for 'Partner', like we've both signed up for. If that meant shouting at each other, well... I've learned that storms can be pinned to ceilings. That's almost an apology." "Where are we going to go to make this whole situation right between us, huh? That's what I'd like. Show me someplace that doesn't suck and we can do something that's not work - that I'll accept as apology."