Madeline glared at Mr. Corydon's little minion, who she didn't hate as much for the sole reason that he seemed just as displeased to be in this situation as they were. Good. Her eyes flicked around the room, assessing everyone's status. Panu had turned off the fire alarms, so there was no painfully loud siren, but their mutations still seemed cut off. Cail seemed nonplussed, which was fine for him because his mutation wasn't passive, and also because Cail always looked nonplussed. He'd looked slightly less nonplussed after seeing the tablet screen Panu had showed him. Considering even Panu had noticed and had politely asked the two men inside to cease whatever it was they were doing, Madeline had stopped trying to eviscerate her desk because it was a bit embarrassing at this point. The teleporter looked a bit stressed, and he kept sniffing the air - that, Madeline understood. The sudden muting of everything was more than a little bit stressful, but she wasn't showing it. She was better than that. Panu looked annoyed at best, disaffected at worst. Overall, everyone seemed fine. Glancing at the still slightly disturbing figure in the center of the room, she almost felt a sense of kinship, in that they were all united by a total lack of forethought when it came to choosing employers.

"Excuse me, Miss..."

"Brass," she said automatically, instinctively. The man nodded and kept going.

”It seems like negotiations have broken down into a brawl. How sturdy are the walls and floors?” Well, that was one way to put it. "Negotiations have broken down into a brawl." Better than whatever they looked like they were doing, in which case they needed to listen to Panu and get to a hotel and out of the office with walls and floors that would be able to withstand them, but the inside was another question (she doubted Ambrose was even realizing that this was his place of work, and was better intact). Madeline was going to assume that Mr. Corydon was as strong as Jaager, if not more. And in that case.

"They've been Ambrose-proofed," she said shortly. "Unless they're deliberately trying very hard to get through a small portion of wall or floor, nothing will break. Even the glass is almost a foot thick and bulletproof, but that's the weak point." She glanced back at her computer screen. Sometime when she'd been speaking, Ambrose had lost his shirt.

Her claws were making shrill grating noises on her desk again. She didn't notice.

---

Ambrose didn't even hear Panu.

All unnecessary functions had been discarded to focus on the fight. One of those functions had been "listening to anyone other than his opponent." So no, he didn't hear. If he had - or rather, when he did days later, combing through the security footage - he'd be proud. Panu was learning to be passive-aggressive; that was a necessary life skill.

But he was too far gone to even bother with that. If he'd know what Kaz was thinking, he would've laughed. Treating the primal part of you, the monster inside, as a separate entity was idiotic. Ambrose embraced the monster. There was no distinction between him and the primal rage he felt humming below every inch of his skin - maybe there had been, a long time ago, but not anymore. Any human part of Ambrose Jaager was long since dead, and likely had been ever since a little monster clawed its way out of its fleshy little shell. (That wasn't true, but Ambrose wouldn't accept that. There was no place for people undecided between being human or monster in this world - and Ambrose had chosen to be a monster.) But he didn't think this, because he didn't even notice that Kaz was reminiscing. He was too busy grinning as his unexpected weight drove Kaz and all his super strength backwards some.

What he did notice was when his claws and hooked wingtips glanced uselessly off of Kaz's neck. That had been unexpected. He scrambled to recover, but he was too slow - before he knew it, Kaz had a hand around his neck.

And almost immediately, for a brief second, Ambrose went slack.

It was a primal reaction. Wolves, for example, bare their necks to each other in shows of submission. The feral part of Ambrose's mind, the part that was in control right now - his lizard brain, as it was appropriately known - had recognized "hand around neck" as immediate grounds for surrender. Thankfully, he stopped that absurdity before it went any further. At the same time as his instincts processed that the brunt of the attack was not targeted at his neck, the logical part of his brain bemoaned him for being an idiot and humiliating himself in a fight. That was a bit too wild. He might have to reel it in a bit so something so downright ridiculous wouldn't happen again.

Distracted, he was only barely able to get into motion fast enough to keep himself from shattering all over the floor he himself had built to withstand someone ten times Ambrose's strength, because he was attached to his building and would like the top floor to stay on. He was strong, yes, but his mutation was never meant to be part of a human form. All the extra dragon meat, squished into this small shape, might provide a bit of cushioning, but nothing near what Kaz must've thought he had to use this much force. Using his momentum to his advantage, he rolled a bit so he took the majority of the blow to his left shoulder, and almost pierced through the layers of wood. The floor splintered, but the metal beneath the wood didn't even dent. Ambrose knew immediately that his left shoulder had been dislocated, and that a particularly large splinter of wood had nearly sliced his bicep in half. Moving quickly, while Kaz expected him to still be recovering from what was meant to be a paralyzingly blow, he rolled upwards and rammed his shoulder against the nearby desk - thankfully drilled into the floor - and set the bone back in place with a sickening crack. When he moved away, black blood was smeared all over the desk's front, and the real core of Ambrose's mutation was visible through the cut on his arm. A jagged strip of flesh about six inches long and two inches wide was gone, revealing a patch of black scales. His dark blood was oozing through where the splinter had cut through the softened scales, but even now they were hardening with the exposure to air, and the bleeding had stopped within seconds. Letting out a shaky breath, having otherwise dislocated and then reset his shoulder without a sound, Ambrose took a moment to almost relish the pain. It cleared his head, which he liked, and had the added benefit of making him even angrier and more willing to fight.

Ambrose had always fought dirty in order to compensate for his relative lack of skill. And he wasn't going to give up on that philosophy now. He was also a total douche, which was similarly not a philosophy he wasn't going to give up on anytime soon.

So he shrugged off his shirt, first - not actually for one of the above two reasons, but because it was getting tangled up and in his way. He wasn't shy at all - the AMA where he'd taken his shirt off on camera for the Internet proved that - and while vanity was a part of it, Ambrose also just didn't understand the taboo on showing skin. No big deal. Humans were the only species to develop clothes, and if he had washboard abs, why not show them off? Admittedly, his skin was rather marred at this point by the patch of dark scales and the dark blood dripping down his arm, but this wasn't a fashion show. This was a fight.

"Hey," Ambrose said, all of a sudden, looking Kaz directly in the eye. And then he flicked his gaze very conspicuously downward, making it very clear what he was looking at. "Mine is bigger," he fake-whispered conspiratorially, a vicious grin on his face. There was his douche philosophy shining through. (Obviously, if he was asked by, say, Panu, he was referring to Kaz's abdomen, even though Ambrose was conspicuously less bulky, even with his mutation making him look like he worked out much more than he actually did. But obviously. Abs.)

This one was going to be a little harder to explain, though, because Ambrose was about to fight dirty.

He was going more for the shock factor here than anything, because Ambrose was lunging again, but this time he was aiming a bit lower than the throat. Well, a lot lower. And he wasn't aiming to just cut, he was aiming to remove (Kaz's abdomen, obviously). Yes, his claws hadn't worked so well last time, but he sure wasn't going to use his teeth because that would send a completely wrong message. Expecting the same result as last time he'd attempted to claw Kaz's flesh, Ambrose was ready this time to roll out of the way to respond to whatever Kaz tried next. He knew from experience that his back spikes were beautiful roll-assistors, in that they'd dig into the ground and keep his trajectory stable. Hopefully, the shock would be enough to delay Kaz a bit so Ambrose could think of something better to do next opening he got.

He seriously hoped Kaz hadn't noticed the neck thing. Ambrose was relatively confident he could stop it from happening again, but his primal side was winning this fight, so he'd rather not risk it.

---

Outside, Cail leaned over Madeline's shoulder, actually showing emotion for once. "He did not," Cail said, his tone part admiration, part horror.

"He did," Madeline said, and wondered why she hadn't just taken a nice, quiet job as a bank teller or something instead.

Kaz' attack dog was almost like a real person when speaking with his own words instead of his master's. Not enough real that Panu wanted to talk with him. The boy emphasized this by looking towards the man and his not-really-an-apology, and then pulling his hood down half way over his face. This maybe messed up all his hair and now there were blonde strands all over his face, but he did not ruin the gesture by swiping at them. (Though maybe he blew some out of the way.) (They came right back.) (It was extremely nose-tickle.)

If Specter wanted to not be on every hit list Panu had the power to put him on, he should have started by not interfering with Panu's power. That was all. Apologies were like candy bribe by wolf who huffed and puffed and already blew house down.

Meanwhile, in room, Jaager was taunt Kaz with fact that his dragon form was the bigger monster. And then he was Molest Kaz.

Eww.

“We should stop them before the police actually arrive,” Cail said, with the reluctance of a Vice Principal breaking up a fight between his two most punch-worthy students.

“I can turn on fire sprinklers,” Panu offered.

“Yes. Please.” The tiger secretary's smile was beatific.

That is why there was soon a cold shower in Jaager's office, just for the two men.

”I see.” Specter nodded to Ms. Brass thankful that she didn't seem to be holding what he had, and was doing, against him too much. He wasn't sure about the others...well, except for Panu, who he was pretty sure hated him.

As much as he wanted to believe Ms. Brass would be correct, he knew Kaz. Or at least he knew him as best as any of the Sentinels did, and the man was not a minimalist. He was an extremist. It always seemed Kaz played by one rule: Go big or die.

”I hope that'll be enough then.” If the look on his face and Ms.Brass' desk clawing were anything to go on, neither of them believed it.

Specter couldn't help but perk up at Panu's suggestion. Grinning, ”Oh yes, please do Panu.” Maybe, just maybe, it would make the two men stop what they were doing and act like responsible adults instead of hormone crazed teens.

~~~~~

Kaz was so intent on throwing Ambrose to the ground that he nearly missed the man's reaction when his throat was grabbed. It was only for a brief instant, one easily missed if they weren't paying very close attention. Even Kaz, who caused it, wasn't sure what he had noticed. It could easily have just been a natural reaction of surprise due to being grabbed by the throat, but...

Kaz's eyes narrowed as he felt Ambrose move in his grip, twisting himself at the last moment to change his angular momentum. The floor beneath Ambrose cracked and splintered, spilling a generous amount of the man's blood as he rolled away. At least that's what Kaz had to assume it was, because it flowed from the man's sliced bicep like blood would do, but it was black, like tar. That really didn't mean much in their world. Mutants didn't conform to any singular mold, so that 'blood' could be acid, oil, gasoline, peppermint extract, literally anything else. Hell, Kaz personally knew of a mutant who had actual glass running through her veins.

Taking a step forward he knelt down where the blood began, and without taking his eyes from Ambrose, reached out and touch the blood with two fingers. He rubbed the liquid between those fingers and his thumb getting a feel for it before he brought it near his nose. Nostrils flared and Kaz was certain it was blood, but it had an odd tang to the scent. Sticking out his tongue a bit, he lightly dabbed a very small amount of it onto the tip of his tongue. It was definitely blood, but again, there was something off about it. As he watched Ambrose set his shoulder he decided that the black coloring had to be the source of the odd taste and smell. He made a soft sucking sound before running the tip of his tongue along his lips as he looked at the other man with slightly hooded eyes and a nearly imperceptible smirk of a smile.

He didn't feel the need to go after Ambrose as he recovered. Not because of some fighting code of ethics, but because he wasn't taking this 'fight' seriously. How could he? He had taken Ambrose's measure and he had no chance in hell of matching up to Kaz.

Frowning a bit, Kaz realized that not only was this not a fight, but it wasn't fun, at least not in that way. He'd never be able to enjoy fisticuffs with Ambrose, it would be a one way beat down. So as he watched Ambrose strip off his shirt, Kaz stood up, ripping a piece of splintered wood from the floor, and suppressed a great deal of his abilities. By the time the man's shirt was fully off Kaz had brought himself down to, what he judged to be Ambrose's level. He even went as far as pushing the wood in his hand into his bicep, in the same place Ambrose had been injured. When that barely drew blood he adjusted his skin a bit more, and was satisfied when he had a small gash in his own arm, which stopped bleeding almost immediately.

Kaz let his eyes roam over Ambrose's chest and abdomen. Rose didn't match up to Kaz's natural physique, but he was no slouch either, which Kaz was actually a little surprised by.

”Hey,” He heard Ambrose speak, but it took him a heartbeat to look up from inspecting Ambrose and meet his eyes, then tracked their gaze downward. ”Mine is bigger” Kaz blinked at Rosie-boy and then threw his head back, bursting out in a belly laugh. Ambrose really had NO IDEA did he. It was so juvenile, but it was funny. He could not help himself from looking pointedly look at Ambrose with a raised brow as he tried to assess the man. 'Well, I suppose it's not exactly fair when-'

He cut off his internal thinking as Ambrose lunged at him again. It only took a moment to realize where the man was aiming, especially since he basically advertised his intent.

Kaz snapped his leading leg back and behind his other leg with enough force that it cause his entire body, with a small bit of pressure from his other foot, to rotate at the center of his chest. It hadn't been perfectly executed, he had been a little slow which earned him a light scratch along the shin of his trailing leg as he spun nearly 270 degrees along his horizontal axis and 180 degrees along his vertical axis. This put him above and slightly behind Ambrose as the man's momentum moved his past where Kaz had been.

He snapped his arm out and grabbed Ambrose's shoulder and pulled. Even with his enhanced strength, he had nothing to push against to be able to move Ambrose, and the man had a significant amount of weight on Kaz. So when Kaz pulled, he pulled himself down, riding Ambrose to the floor Kaz quickly readjusted his grip as he began to rebound slightly, so that his hand was around Rose's throat, fingers and thumb easily finding the soft flesh around the esophagus and jugular veins. Kaz's other hand slipped down and around Ambrose's torso and pressed a hand against the man's lower abdomen, just above his waistline, fingers splayed out.

He had tried to place himself on the side Ambrose's back , but the man's wing got in the way, forcing him to stay in the center. The only satisfaction Kaz could get from that was the crunch of snapping bone that had come from the offending wing. As his weight settled onto the man under him, he felt Ambrose's hard spine press into him, drawing blood.

Kaz's full weight was pressed against Ambrose and as he pulled back on the man's neck a bit, he felt Ambrose's spine press into him even more. Kaz flexed the hand against Ambrose's abdomen and used it to push himself up and closer to Ambrose's face until he was able to either whisper into the man's ear, or tear into his neck with his teeth.

Water started spraying out from the sprinklers in the ceiling, completely covering the room with water, including the two men laying on the floor, one atop the other.

He could feel the claws of his hands pressing into Ambrose's flesh as he flexed them. Kaz's tongue slipped from between his lips to brush against Rose's skin to taste the water running down his jaw. Kaz's soft, nearly inaudible, but unmistakably feral voice moved the short distance between his mouth and Ambrose's ear, ”Show and tell Rose.”

~~~~~~

A loud smack sounded from the room as Specter slapped his hand to his face displaying a very Picard-like facepalm. Groaning, ”I need brain bleach.”

Raising his voice he turned his head towards the soaked room, not much, but enough to show where, and to who, he was speaking. ”You know there are things I can't unsee!”

He let his hand drop slowly from his face and sighed heavily.

There was a stunned silence in the office outside for a few moments, after Kaz had managed to pin Ambrose to the floor, and then promptly licked him.

Cail was standing at the desk, staring at the computer screen with an unreadable expression on his face. It would be his normal blankness if it didn't look so... traumatized. Specter spoke, but he didn't hear. He was furrowing his eyebrows at the scene in front of him. Cail was the sort of person who slowed on the highway to get a better look at a five-car pileup, and he was relatively sure this fell under that sort of disaster.

Madeline was pushing the "down" button by the elevator repeatedly. It wasn't lighting up, but that wasn't stopping her. "Please cease all attempts to keep us in this room," she said blankly, addressing Specter, but with the sort of disturbing vocal undertones that indicated evisceration would be imminent if she wasn't obeyed. (It was her Ambrose voice. She'd had a lot of practice.)

"And please give us our mutations back," the teleporter said weakly. Huh. Cail had forgotten - what was his name? Something weird and European, that he remembered - was even here. Unsurprising, considering the man had been receding ever-so-slowly towards the direction of the broom closet over the past few minutes.

"Absolutely not," Madeline snarled, honest-to-god snarled, and everyone flinched. There was quite a bit of jungle in her voice, and definite undertones of a disturbing sound that no human being should be able to produce. It took Cail a bit to process that if he was an empath whose power never turned off, he wouldn't want his power back either.

He sympathized, briefly, and then he just was glad it wasn't him.

She was still stabbing the elevator button, with increasing force. The glass cracked, loudly. Cail took a moment to respect that, because Madeline's mutation-enhanced strength was not on right now, but he was still pretty sure the button was sinking slowly into the wall with each jab.

He glanced down at the screen, took one look at the scene before him, and promptly decided he didn't want to watch anymore.

---

Ambrose had actually noticed Kaz licking his blood (which, in hindsight, ew, how did Kaz know that he didn't have an STD or something, what was it with him and meeting people who licked the weirdest things); he just hadn't been bothered enough to respond properly at the time. And now still wasn't the time to properly respond. Had Ambrose been in enough control of himself, or had he possessed knowledge of the specifics of Kaz's powers, he probably would've surrendered a while ago. (Which, yes, surrender was a viable option over dying. Humiliation could be forgotten, death... couldn't?) But as it was, Ambrose had neither control nor that knowledge, which meant that he would still stubbornly attempt to fight. Some part of him probably knew that he was definitely gonna lose if he stayed human, and that was the part that was all for going full jabberwocky. But another part wanted this building to stay intact, please, because he was very much attached to this building and Jabberwocky wasn't one to care about collateral damage.

Either way, his reflexes were too slow when it came to Kaz. It was surprising enough that he managed to nick Kaz's shin, though come to think of it, he was pretty sure Kaz had been patronizing him by handicapping himself just then. Okay, so skin density could change. That was... what made Ambrose actually start considering the scope of Kaz's power and maybe the idea that he wasn't going to win this fight. Well, he might be able to tolerate that. The animal inside was grudgingly respecting a show of physical superiority, which Kaz was definitely providing, but that was fighting pretty heavily with Ambrose's nausea at the idea of letting someone, with, inexplicably, an ego just as or even bigger than his, win. He didn't like that. The human part of him was "hell no-ing" that idea.

Yeah, the more he thought about it, the worse of an idea it seemed.

Unfortunately, he didn't really have a choice in the matter, because once again Kaz showed he was stronger. Ambrose was pretty much snatched midair, and he had a moment to feel slightly gleeful that he apparently weighed so much more than Kaz did, because when Kaz tried to pull him up he went down instead. (This was, very likely, the first time any sentient being had been gleeful over weighing more than someone else, but the rules changed when that weight wasn't from fat but instead stuffed-up dragon.) Ambrose was only able to take a moment to revel in that before he hit the ground and Kaz's still-considerable weight was pinning him down. His back arched up in a response to the pain when one of his wings crunched with an unpleasant noise - though, to Ambrose's credit, he didn't make a sound past a sharp hiss of air through his teeth - but he was vindictively pleased to find unfamiliarly warm blood tricking down his back. He kept trying to dig the sharp plates on his back into Kaz's stomach then, obviously, because apparently that worked if nothing else before had. That was what Cail had looked down to see - because, as it turned out, while Ambrose knew he was trying to move his back upwards, it looked an awful lot like something else was happening.

If it'd just been Kaz's weight, Ambrose would've been able to literally throw the other man off (and out the window, because wouldn't that have been satisfying), but Kaz was - wait a second, Kaz's hands weren't actually pinning him down so he could theoretically throw the man, but that was before he felt one hand wrap around his neck and another around his abdomen.

He went still.

That wasn't the instinctive reaction again - Ambrose had tamped that down when he felt the overwhelming urge to bare his neck even further, believe it or not, because his instincts were apparently conspiring against him. No, this was logic, because he'd seen that Kaz was faster, and judging by where those claws were positioned, he'd be dead in a pool of arterial spray before he even managed to move. (Also, in terms of sheer mechanics, he didn't think he could throw Kaz off without danger to his throat, even if Kaz hadn't had enhanced reflexes. One arm - the dislocated one - was also tucked and pinned under his chest, and the other splayed out in front of him in an attempt to break his fall previously, which didn't make the greatest leverage. He suspected that was why he was pinned in this position to begin with.)

He felt Kaz pull a little on his neck, and he had no choice but to go with the movement to avoid decapitation-by-claws. It had the added effect of allowing Ambrose to get in one more sharp dig with his back spines, and feeling more of Kaz's blood run down his back was a horribly pathetic yet ultimately satisfying (however minimal) form of revenge.

He could feel Kaz moving, to try and scoot upwards, apparently. Ambrose was feeling vindictive. He hoped to whatever deity was listening that Kaz managed to castrate himself on one of Ambrose's spines, because that would be the most hilarious form of cosmic payback ever.

Kaz's teeth were worryingly close to Ambrose's neck, now. And then the sprinklers went off. Ambrose had just a little bit of coherency to consider the fact that he'd heard the fire alarm a bit ago, and the sprinklers were going off rather belatedly, but that was overshadowed when he felt Kaz's fingers flexed. Kaz's claws dug into Ambrose's flesh, and -

Ewww.

Ambrose fought the urge to squirm away like an eight year old boy being confronted by an overly affectionate aunt. That was gross. Kaz had just licked him. Now was the time for Ambrose to process that Kaz had licked Ambrose's blood off his fingers not sixty seconds ago, and be even further grossed out by that. Because there was no situation where licking someone's face was considered appropriate. No matter what, it came off as creepy, and this time, it came off as mega-creepy. Disturbingly, Ambrose wasn't even that affected by the creepiness of it - it was how unsanitary it was that actually creeped him out. Seriously. If there was one thing he was learning that he thought was so gross (thanks Noel), it was licking. Period. Just - it's not attractive. Don't. (He felt very strongly on this topic. Why, he didn't know, but the last person who attempted licking as a seduction tactic on him got punched in the face.)

"Show and tell, Rose," Kaz growled into Ambrose's ear, so close that Ambrose could actually feel the other man's breath. It took a moment for him to figure out what Kaz meant. And then oh, come on, not even Ambrose would say or do that.

---

"I need brain bleach. You know there are things I can't unsee!"

"Nope," said Cail, having joined the teleporter by the broom closet. "Don't do that to yourself, mate. Just turn the bloody computer off."

"Stop. Whatever. The. F*ck. You're. Doing," Madeline said, her voice dangerously low and calm, in a way that suggested that if Specter didn't comply, she would find a way to remove all of his organs and display them outside of his body, lack of mutation be damned.

Nobody that knew her doubted this. At all.

---

Ambrose didn't say anything. He just lay there for a full minutes, going over his options, and eliminating them one by one. As satisfying as it would be to throw Kaz out the window, he wouldn't be able to enjoy it if he was bleeding out on the floor. Reverting to his true form was also out because there were ways to survive this that didn't end up with his building horribly disfigured. And so on and so forth, until he was left with one unpleasant option. He could still feel Kaz's claws digging into his neck and stomach - the two most vulnerable parts of the body, as he was sure Kaz knew - and his survival instinct was even telling him to breathe more shallowly, the claws were pressed so tightly.

"If you could get off of me," Ambrose said calmly, having regained some semblance of pride in those sixty seconds. He wasn't yet at a point where he would feel the urge to smash his face into something because thank you 20/20 hindsight, but he could think coherently and human-ly about the situation at hand, and not with aggressive, monstrous impulses. "That would be lovely." The words were typical Ambrose - pretentious, obnoxious, and precise - but the tone was different. And to make his point clear, he bared his neck a bit more and pressed it into Kaz's claws, drawing little beads of black blood. His point was clear - he wasn't going to fight back, just yet - but he'd done it with the least amount of verbal abuse to himself, in terms of humiliation, so it was the most dignified of a surrender he was going to get.

"Fire department and police are here," Panu stated very clearly from Ambrose's speaker phone. "Is good time to put clothes back on."

He did not say anything further. He did call the elevator for Ms Brass, because now the panel was broken under her jabbing finger so it would never come again with a button press. Not until repairman came. He also called all other elevators. Top floor, all, so they would be slow to come when police asked. Hopefully this was enough time for shirts and pants to be put back on.

If it wasn't, he did not really care.

Panu sat down in a corner, tucked in next to a potted plant. He settled his headphones comfortably and closed his eyes and played Fruit Ninja on Jaager's phone that was in his shed coat pocket and watched as fire department herded employees a safer distance from building-that-was-maybe-on-fire.

He did not watch inside video feeds. Reactions from adults were good enough to tell him this was not TV for children.

Specter looked uncomfortable as Ms. Brass demanded he let them out, and what the goings on in the other room, he could not blame her. Unfortunately, he was not able to comply since he wasn't actively preventing them from leaving. He was trying to figure out if he should explain this when the teleporter, who's name he didn't know, spoke up. His request Specter could comply with, or at least he could have if hadn't struck them all the same way he had with the walls.

The woman's response to getting their abilities back was so sharp and quick that Specter's head actually flinched back a bit. Specter couldn't help but wonder why the woman was so against him returning their powers and didn't think it would be the best time to inquire. Instead he made a slight coughing sound just after the button audible cracked in an attempt to cover how uncomfortable he was feeling.

The tiger woman's clipped words, tone, and body language was not lost on Specter. She was angry enough that he figured a physical attack was imminent. Knowing that would be a foolish move on her part, he decided he should do something to stop it before it happened. Specter moved to stand in Ms. Brass' desk, dragging the lance of light through the floor as he did so, he addressed the woman, ”Unfortunately Ms. Brass, I am unable to do what you ask. At least, not for...” He looked at the nearest clock, ”Another few minutes.” This wasn't precisely true, he could let them leave, but it was not as simple as it might appear to be.

Spreading one arm out to the side in a somewhat helpless gesture, ”I apologize, believe me, I really do, but for the moment I'm unable to do anything t-” Specter cut off as he heard what Panu had said in the other room and scowled unhappily.

He looked at the kid as he sat on the floor next a plant and closed his eyes, apparently to shut out what was going on. The two men seemed to be trying their best to disappear into the closet. Ms. Bass seemed to be ready to kill someone as she stood at the elevator doors.

Sighing, Specter began pacing as he pinched the bridge of his nose.

After a moment he stopped in his tracks, grinned, and dismissed the lance of red-violet light. After a brief communication with Legion he turned to look at Ms. Brass, Cail, Panu, and the other man. ”The situation should be taken care of in a few moments, then all you'll need to do is wait a short time before you are able to return to your usual schedules.” Smiling, ”Hopefully without any further.... awkwardness.”

~~~~~~

The nick on Kaz's shin had not only stopped bleeding but it had disappeared by the time Ambrose spoke, the damage having been spread around Kaz's body so well that he seemed untouched. And if one ignored the wounds in his chest from the man's spines, he was unharmed. The blood on Ambrose's back had come from the initial wounds and a little more when he had tried to dig them deeper into Kaz's flesh. There was no point in removing that damage until the two men separated.

If Ambrose hadn't pressed his own neck into Kaz's claws, his words might have caused Kaz to rip his throat and belly open. Submissive tone or not, the man was in no position to ask Kaz for anything or to make demands. Kaz felt the urge to rip into Ambrose, to gouge out a bit of the man's flesh, just to push the point home of who held the dominant hand.

But he didn't, 'There's no reason to, he knows it already.' he told himself as he set his feet on the floor and lifted his weight from atop the man, 'Otherwise he wouldn't have stopped struggling. Even a beast knows when its beat.' He didn't remove his hand from Rose's abdomen for long moments, not because he wanted to make a point, but because of vanity.

In those moments he had removed the damage he had allowed Ambrose to cause him. Those wounds went from something ragged and painful to hundreds of smaller scratches all over his body, making it hard to tell that he had been wounded at all.

The lack of trust was the reason why Kaz took longer to remove his claws from around Ambrose's neck. The man might be beat, and know it, but that didn't necessarily mean he would give up completely.

As he began to stand up, ready to respond to Rose's words, Legion made Kaz aware of what was about to happen. Kaz's head snapped up, 'What?!' He didn't have much time, so he made a decision quickly.

From one heartbeat to the next, both Ambrose and Kaz were gone from the room, with only a very faint shimmer of the air where they had been, and even that quickly dissipated.

~~~~~

Specter looked around the room, but looked at Panu, ”Sorry it took so long, but they're both gone now.” Turning his gaze to Ms. Brass, ”Unless there's a reason for me to stay, I should also be on my wa... But before I do, I don't think it's necessary to track Panu and further than this.” The volent-red light appeared in his hand again and seemed to take on the same of a young woman as moved towards the boy. Specter seemed to sag a bit when the figure moved away from him. When the figure extended her hand and touched Panu's shoulder there was a brief flash of red-violet light from the point of contact.

When the figure retreated back to Specter and the light winked out, the man stood straight backed once again. He'd wait a minute or so until those in the room confirmed what he'd said and to see if they had anything to say or ask of him. After that he'd make his exit the same way the two men had moments before.