Kirsi was tempted to chase after the woman who was running after the courier, but her job was done. She had delivered the folder to the next courier in line, all the way from New Hampshire (and it was far colder there than it was here, giving her nostalgic memories of Norway), and she’d gotten paid for it. It looked as if she’d have to hold off the police, then, until she could engineer a suitable exit. And that hobo was not a suitable exit. He’d just been a witness, and she was in no way capable of jogging off into the distance with him.

She pulled a burner phone out of her pocket and dialed the only number in the contacts list. The person on the other end picked up on the first ring. ”Renegade?” came the familiar voice.

”Goods acquired, proceed to meeting point. There’s been a slight complication, but the package is on the way. Move to safe location." She snapped the small briefcase up and eyed the statue barely visible some ways off, and then launched it best she could, aware that this was a rather dumb-looking way to transport things, but it worked fine. She missed by a little bit, but she was getting better at the large things. ”Erm, target missed. By a little. Thirty feet east, maybe.”

”Copy. Goods located. Proceeding to safe location.”

”Hold for further orders,” she muttered, and promptly launched the phone against a tree. It smashed and left a sizable dent, the shards embedded into the wood, and only then did she notice the teenager kneeling beside her whose ear she had nearly taken off.

And he started to recite a nursery rhyme.

She stared at him, completely unsure of what to do in this situation. He wasn’t terrified. He should be. So she picked up a pebble and held it very visibly, almost as if she were warning him, making its existence very clear in her palm, as she stared very pointedly at his foot.

She was completely thrown off by the sudden wave of nausea that hit her.

Mutant, her mind was screaming, and she stumbled up, launching the pebble approximately at where she thought the guy was. And another. And another. At this rate she was just fumbling around to find anything that could conceivably neutralize his power, and by that she meant hurt him enough to shut up. She was scrambling backwards in the meantime, and eventually managed to get up and run - well, stumble off - as well as she could. The whole thing took about five seconds, but even when she could no longer hear him speaking, she made a beeline for the woods, where she could conceal herself relatively decently. Sure, she'd been shot and disoriented, but instincts are hard to kill, and the first of hers to respond was that of self-preservation.

She slumped against a tree, out of sight, pulling on old training to shut out the pain and the effects of that jerk's mutation to figure out her next move. She was not a vengeful person, usually, so she would not kill the boy. Or maybe she would, if he kept chasing her. Or maybe he was dead already, considering her violent reaction to encountering his mutation. But he was an enemy now. Not a target, but an enemy.

She picked up a rock and targeted a leaf. It punched a perfect hole through it, and Kirsi smiled, satisfied that her senses were up to speed again. Damn that man and his power.

Now. How to escape.

((OOC: Sorry guys, didn’t realise we were waiting for META to hit the scene, but of course it makes sense >.>)) ((Zinnia has left the thread to escort Ty home, this post is all META))

ATS00053 and his copanions were the first badges on the scene. There was a knight on the way too, but there had been come difficulty loading it into the vehicle. From the continued updates over the shoulder-radios of the human officers it was apparent they were still having difficulties loading it into the vehicle. It was up to ATS. If he could have felt, he would have felt proud to be out serving the citizens he was assigned to protect. As it was, it just trundled out and into the park on the instructions of its handler. It could operate itself, but the boys in blue wanted to play with their newest piece of tech.

The group of three arrived at the park to find a gaggle of bystanders around a messy scene. Three, no four casualties scattered about the park, and the perpetrator nowhere to be seen. Catching sight of the law, people began to point, and garbled accounts of what happened and the way the mutant went were volunteered. The police proritiesed, clearly this was a volatile situation, and while they had conflicting information on what the mutant looked like; some were sure it was a small, pale girl, others suggested a young black woman, one particularly vocal witness insisted it had been a figure made up entirely of the path gravel, all the accounts were clear on two things: 1, This was a mutant, and 2, it went that way.

The main handler gave ATS some instructions while his partner moved to cordon off the area and throw privacy bankets (unzipped body bags) over the casualties. There were kids staring for Christs Sake.

“Ok At-Zeus, you’re up. Mutant with unknown ability, hostile, 4 casualties. Hiding somewhere in that corpse of trees.”

The morbidly apt description of the trees was lost on the officer, who was scanning the assembled witnesses with his hand-held scanner, looking for mutants to be aware of. It was entirely possible that the perpetrator was part of a group of attackers (four casualties and all within such a short space of time that the cops were called only once the noise began, it was possibly gang related), and while one had split, it didn’t mean that the area was secure.

ATS00053 zoomed off towards the trees, his specialised feet navigating the tricky terrain (path edge, garden bed, discarded tangle of kite-strings) with ease. This was what he was designed for. The inbuilt scanner swept over the shrubs and bushes, in between the trunks and the last of the stubborn summer flowers. He was searching, searching for a mutant who had caused so much trouble. If he could feel, he might have been scared. He couldn’t feel fear. He was designed not to.

On the shoulder of junior officer Stevens the message came through that the knight, and assorted other uniformed back up, was finally on the way. It didn’t distract him from his task. There was a killer to be caught.

The girl would not scare him. She did. She would not-- oh, screw this, one-upping a hobo was no excuse for nearly getting his ear taken off, or anything else for that matter. He really should get up and leave, now...now...now.

It was very much too late for that.

Kai stretched out the rhyme as deliberately as the girl's apparent threat to throw her pebble through his foot. "If Peter Piper picked-" She caught on all too soon, and then it was only the effects from his mutation that were saving him so he kept talking, kept making word like sounds until long after he was sure she had gone.

Flattened amid the long grass by the side of the pebble strewn path they'd been on, the teen squeezed gray eyes shut and breathed. This he could be content with forever, to lie in a field of itchy weeds. What was a little headache when you'd just almost been stoned to death, and by a kid no less? If he tried hard enough he could almost ignore it, just like that mysterious region of numbness in his left arm- wait, that was bad, was his arm still even there?

... yes. He couldn't feel from his pinky finger to a little above his elbow; whoever had named the funny bone had had a terrible sense of humor, but that was all.

Kai joined the cluster around newly arrived help. "I'm a mutant," he told the officer before they could scan him. "Tell your bot not to shoot me, though. The killer's a girl, really blonde, not ten years old, launches stuff at Mach 10 or so." 

Oh, dammit. META was on the scene. This wasn’t good. If she was scanned, that would conceivably compromise any future missions of hers. So she needed to invalidate herself as a threat, in order to keep the META bots off her trail. She could hear it moving through the forest’s fringe, and so she scrambled to untie the binding around her leg, balling the blood-soaked cloth into a decently compact projectile, held together by the liquid soaking it. She launched it into the ground, the sound muffled by the leaves and the fact that it was still cloth, and though it did disintegrate a bit, she wanted that. The surviving remnants were deep enough that they wouldn’t be found, as she hastily covered the remains of the cloth with dirt. And then she picked up a rock and stood up, keeping her back to the tree she’d been leaning against. She eyed the hole in her leg, attempting to mentally prepare herself for what she was about to do, as she lined up the rock to the wound. The shot she made went clearly through the original injury but kept on going, unlike the bullet, which she had stopped. The shrill scream she let out was only partially acting.

She slumped against the tree, gritting her teeth to try and compartmentalize the pain. Her plan was this - most people had only seen her use a concussive blast against the man attacking her, merely throwing him back. They probably wouldn’t register that she had caught the bullet and launched it back, and the conclusion would have to be that the man was shot by somebody else. The same somebody else who'd just shot Kirsi - or at least in her version of events.

She just hoped that boy wouldn't ruin everything.