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"Honey, I'm sure Jack - whoever he is - would want you to be safe. You're not safe right now," the woman said. Well, that was nice of her. Unfortunately, Kirsi wasn't one to drop a briefcase full of money when she had it. Yes, it was rather nice that the woman told the police to not shoot, even though it wouldn't've mattered anyway. But she was also the nearest person to take hostage. Kirsi would apologize, but she wasn't really sorry.

"Sorry," she said anyway, on principle, before grabbing the woman and leaping off of the roof.

She'd checked before she'd jumped, of course. The neighboring building wasn't that far off, in terms of horizontal distance, but was more than a little far off in terms of vertical distance. Fortunately for the both of them, Kirsi was very experienced in controlled falling. So when they landed on the rooftop, it felt more like falling ten feet than ten stories. It still hurt, but not as much as it otherwise would've. But Kirsi's skin now seemed to glow with energy. She'd expended some by essentially launching the woman - almost unnoticeably gently - upward, and by clinging to the woman, she was able to even further slow their fall. But she mostly just absorbed the kinetic energy as they fell, keeping them at a constant, relatively low velocity.

As they landed, tumbling onto the cement, Kirsi grabbed a coin out of her pocket and showed it to the woman when they slowed to a halt. "Don't move," she hissed, the coin clearly a threat. The police probably thought they'd died, and she'd let them. They'd move in a couple of minutes when the police left the opposite rooftop.

"I'm sure someone owns that bush and didn't want it destroyed." Kirsi frowned a bit. That was rude. She'd just apologized to him -

She fought the urge to facepalm, because nope, she'd done that in Norwegian. "Sorry," she apologized again, this time in English, but with the faintest of accents bleeding through. Her voice was unintentionally small and childish, as any child's became when they were berated by somebody older than they were. "I got frustrated. It's a very confusing maze."

She glanced around, partially to check if anyone else was nearby, partially out of embarrassment from completely ruining her stealth mission. No matter, though - this man looked like he could help her. He didn't need to know about the real reason Kirsi was here, and he didn't seem like the kind of person who would know Kirsi from her main occupation. Unless he was from Scandinavia, she supposed, and had been around during her "reign of terror," but he didn't look like it.

"Could you perhaps help me?" she asked politely, her cute little child facade back on. "Someone dared me to find the middle of the maze, but I've been walking for so long and I can't find it." She scrunched up her nose, in a belated attempt to look cute. "They triple-dog-dared me, so I have to find it."

"'It'll be fun,' they said," Kirsi grumbled in Norwegian under her breath. "'Just find the center,' they said." She'd been trundling through this maze for about half an hour, by now, and she still couldn't figure out where the middle of the damn maze was. One of her acquaintances had informed her that somebody had put out a challenge of sorts - this mysterious employer had placed something in the center of the X-Mansion's maze, and was offering a reward for whoever could get it out without alerting the X-Men. This wasn't the first time Kirsi had seen underworld games involving the X-Men, considering they weren't really fond of people in her profession, but this was the first time she'd decided to participate out of sheer boredom. A lot of people were too scared to take the risk of getting caught just to play a game, but Kirsi was confident in her ability to talk her way out of any issue.

What she didn't expect was for the maze to be so annoyingly... maze-like. She really was having trouble finding her way around, and she was starting to get frustrated with her inability to find the stupid middle of the maze.

"That's it," she finally snapped at some point to nobody in particular, still in Norwegian because she used her native language whenever possible. "I hate this stupid maze." She turned towards the hedge to her left and raised her arms as she closed her eyes. With a brief bit of focus, the leaves and branches snapped and flew away from her with a blast of concussive force. The burst of foliage just barely missed someone walking down the adjoining path, and Kirsi froze. There went the stealth part of this.

"Unnskyld," she said, in the wrong language without even realizing it. Sorry.

"Dette er kjedelig," Kirsi said aloud, to nobody in particular, and in her native Norwegian, so it wasn't like anyone around here would understand anyway. This is boring. Because it was - she was here, in one of the many conference rooms of the JW building, waiting for a package. She didn't like to have business-related things delivered to the house she lived in, especially since she shared it with someone else, and it was just common courtesy to ensure that nobody vengeful showed up on your doorstep when it was someone else's doorstep too. Normally, she'd pick up her payments from a drop point, but her last job had paid quite a bit, and her employer had insisted on a messenger in order to make sure his money was reaching the right place. So she'd gone to JW and asked the nice front desk lady if she could wait for a package there, but someone else was there because it was the nice one's lunch break, and Kirsi had had to call Madeline because she wasn't sure if the replacement knew about Ragnarok, and it'd just been the most effort Kirsi had ever put into getting paid. Now, she was sitting in the conference room that Madeline had placed her in, waiting for someone to arrive with a package for Jenny Smith. (She was bad at aliases.)

"What the hell am I doing?" Kirsi frowned, turning to look at the door behind her. It was cracked open just a bit, and she could've sworn that she heard someone outside. She clambered out of the tall conference chair with some effort - it was clearly meant for somebody significantly larger than her - and hopped onto the floor. When she went to open the doors, she didn't even bother with an attempt to do so normally, because she couldn't even make one budge on its own. With a little, silent boost from her mutation, the door swung open easily, and Kirsi stepped out into the hallway.

"Hello?" she called out, her voice unintentionally accented because she'd been talking to herself in Norwegian just before.

"The police can help you," the woman said, and okay, that was expected. Doing well so far. "Whatever's going on, robbing a bank is not the way to deal with it. You need to put the briefcase down and step away from the edge. Can you tell me your name?"

"Huginn," she said, and was briefly entertained by the mental picture of the distress the police would be feeling when they heard that name, because it would most definitely be connected to Ragnarok, and not to the freelancer Renegade. "They told me to say that if anyone asked," she continued with a little bit of highly accurate panic, before she suddenly registered that the woman was inching towards her.

"Don't come any closer," Kirsi said immediately, holding out her hand. The quarter was still there, but now she shifted her palm so that it was more visible. "I'm really sorry. I don't want to hurt you. But they said that if I didn't bring them the money, they're going to hurt Jack, and I can't let them hurt Jack."

Who was Jack - her brother, maybe? Yes, little brother. That worked well. She didn't think she'd have to continue the story any further, though, because she could finally feel the elevator settling in at the roof. Weren't the police always late to the party, though?

"I... Who are they? Who are they going to hurt?"

Kirsi glanced the woman over once, making multiple deductions that would impact her next words. Body language was non-threatening and her tone was calm - okay, she'd succeeded in making the woman think that Kirsi was a victim. Good. Unfortunately, in order to buy time (now she really was waiting for the police, because the more witnesses for what she was about to do, the better), she'd have to add to the story. And making a lie more elaborate always ended badly, because it was harder than it looked to keep track of everything. Fortunately, she wouldn't have too much to keep track of if she kept it simple.

"I can't say," she said, adding a touch of fear to her voice. "They're gonna hurt Jack if I tell anyone anything. I can't say."

She could vaguely feel the elevator she'd taken up going back down, the energy trickling in from a corner of her consciousness, which meant that there was still quite a bit of time she needed to stall. She glanced away from the woman for a brief moment to scan the ground below her. There was a slightly small apartment complex right across the busy street below, about ten stories down. That was good. She turned her attention back to the woman to see what she'd do next.