Zaaaap! BAM!

The arm around her throat dropped away, and Megan danced to the side before the guy's suddenly limp body could crush her underneath him as he pitched forward. With surprise written all over her face (though, it was mostly hidden and therefore not all that important), she caught sight of Allison with stun gun in hand and grinned. A swift thumbs up was all the thanks she managed to give before the fight followed the ink wielding mutant over to where Megan had been struggling with her assailant.

With one man down, that Allison had just attacked, and the man Megan herself had been fighting still clawing at himself in terror, she turned her attention to who was left of the rest of them. At the same time, the woman who'd been under attack in the first place fell along side Allison and herself, knife in hand and ready.

It appeared that Allison had taken care of at least two others, as they were only facing the older male who'd started the problem (and also insinuated that they were a bunch of no good lousy clowns), and a young kid at his side. One looked downright pissed, and for good reason. Nearly his entire gang had been reduced to groaning, screaming, bleeding idiots. The other, though, the kid... looked... please?

Wait... where had she seen that kid before? He looked so famili--

"Ohcrap..." The second after the words left her lips, the older man raised his hand and motioned for the kid at his side to do something. Instantly there was whoos of air, and a dense fog rolled out from seemingly nowhere, covering the entire area in a second flat. $@&#! She'd run across the little bastard once before... and had been forced to run away with her tail tucked firmly betwixt her legs. "Move back!" She hollered, as the air became steadily harder and harder to breath.

"The kid's a mutant! Move back outta range! If, that is, they could figure out where 'out of range' was...

The kid in question started laughing. A little extra energy went into his talent, and the fog rolled away with another whooosh, creating a churning circle around the area. The pressure suddenly doubled, making it a whole heck of a lot harder to breath, and move for that matter.

"...See, ladies? This is why I'm gonna win. Get ready to meet your makers." From within a nice little bubble of unaffected atmosphere around the kid, the man grinned, folded his arms across his chest and waited. He didn't even seem to care all that much that his own men were stuck within the danger zone, either.

Charlotte escaped--fortunately, as the guy was limp and still now; Allison would have really had to worry if Charlotte had managed to stay caught that way. She grinned back at the thumbs up she received, adrenaline and triumph mixing and overwhelming anything else. The fight paused, and the woman they’d rescued joined them, bloody knife in hand and now looking distinctly vicious and powerful and not much in need of rescuing.

Charlotte’s sudden swearing drew a raised eyebrow from Allison, but not much attention; Charlotte, in her mind, was the kind of person who managed to be competent at walking, but still spent the entire process tripping and flailing and falling on other people. So whatever warning of not right Allison might have found was dismissed as Charlotte stumbling her way to competency. That particular misperception was thoroughly shredded as a sudden fog appeared.

Allison did move back, only to trip over the form of one of the men one of them had taken down earlier. She fell on her back, stun gun skittering out of her reach as her knuckles crashed into pavement, and her breath following it. The hand with the knife hit, too, but not so hard, and the still closed knife bounced, landing still on her palm, if not so well placed. She gasped, trying to breath, and got no result; tried again and again and still felt like there was no air, though she must be getting some, since she wasn’t noticing many of the effects that actually lacking air would cause. Her hand closed, found the end of the knife barely resting on the bottom of her hand, let go and twisted and closed again, clenching around the metal and angles and weight, trying to block out the boy’s laughter. The fog disappeared and Allison still felt like she couldn’t breath, and she could see the sky, clouds hiding the stars and turning the moon into an area of glow.

It shouldn’t seem familiar, but it did. And the familiarity felt familiar, too. Allison ignored what she heard; it didn’t matter what the man or the boy said, and she didn’t want to hear Charlotte or the woman upset. She clenched her hand more tightly around the closed knife, then relaxed as the edges bit into her skin, made her lungs breath in and out and in and out and it doesn’t matter if it feels like they’re empty; she pushes herself over and onto her hands and knees and feet, and she’s standing and walking toward the man (not Joe, not Joe; a match for Joe; the same laugh and same goal and same destruction of her mood; same evil). Walking is slow and hard but she can do it, and all her attention now is on in and out and forward, and the knife turns in her hand and the blade opens out; she gets close and raises her arm for his eye and she’s back on the ground and the knife is gone; her head hurts and the man is unhurt and oh, he must have hit her. She stares up at him, and it’s only when the boy kicks her side that she realizes that Joe wasn’t paying attention to her but this man was and walking toward him wasn’t a good idea.

It was worse than before... much, much worse. She felt like she was drowning on air... like being slowly crushed under the pressure of nonexistent water, and every time she tried to take a breath in, nothing happened. Was she even breathing anymore...? She wasn't sure. One thing she was sure about, though, was that they needed to escape, or take that kid down, and quickly... before they lost the fight.

Megan lost track of Allison and the other girl for a while, unable to get past her own terrible experience. When she finally managed to pushed herself up onto a knee, her knife still grasped tightly in one hand, she spotted one of the two women. Allison! She'd gotten closer to the two attackers, probably on the same wavelength as Megan when it came to how to fix the situation. The only problem was that Allison was on the ground, and neither of the guys looked injured.

Cursing silently, Megan struggled to stand. On the third attempt she found it nearly impossible, and fell back to a knee. The situation seemed impossible, like all of the odds were stacked against them. She knew she couldn't bumrush them... she didn't have the strength to carry herself that far... She also didn't know if she was good enough at throwing an knife yet to even begin to hope hitting one of them. That left only one option, one she hated using...

Reaching back, she dragged out the pistol she had tucked into the back of her pants. She was a crappy shot, never liked guns anyway... but she could see no alternative. Raising the dull black weapon, she squinted through onsetting dizziness, and took aim at the cackling mutant boy...

Just before she'd been about to pull the trigger, though, a dark red rectangular blur shot in through the surrounding ring of fog. It arched like a homing missile straight toward the protective bubble surrounding the two males. With an audible CRACK the brick stuck the kid on the shoulder, breaking his concentration in one blow. The bubble burst, suddenly and violently changing the atmosphere around the two. Each screamed as their eardrums burst, and another WOOSH signaled another change in atmosphere. Megan felt it a split second later when her ears popped painfully, and a terribly pressure started building up behind her eyes.

The devastating dome the kid had created was slowly starting to shift back to normal, and before he could gather himself to fix that, seven figured darted in from outside the dissipating mist walls. Each figure was bathed in black, with hoods drawn up over their hair and masks of varying kinds covering their faces. Four of the group headed straight toward the two thugs, while three broke off to rush to the other girls side.

With her ears still ringing, Megan forced herself to her feet and staggered over to Allison. She didn't have a clue what was going on, but seeing as most of the strangers already had weapons drawn, she honestly didn't want to know...