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It'd been fifteen minutes. Kirsi was constantly checking the childish purple watch she wore, which seemed innocent enough, but had really been synced to the second with her partner's. That was usual protocol for any group of people going on a mission, after all. And, as expected, her comm finally buzzed to life in a faint crackle of static.

"Grail retrieved. Mad Dog out." Kirsi could hear something in the background - Maddox was presumably making his way out through the partygoers, as he tended to prefer teleporting as a last resort.

"Copy. Wait at meet point."

"Copy," the voice said back, but suddenly, there was an agitated cry.

"Mad Dog, report," Kirsi said quickly, peering back through her scope. She located her partner almost immediately in the throngs of screaming people - she'd know him anywhere - and watched as he immediately and instinctively ducked for cover.

"An interloper found our mockingbird," he said distastefully. Following his line of sight with her scope, Kirsi swore in Swedish under her breath.

"Helvete," she growled softly. She'd never learned to swear in Norse - people were rather conscientious of that sort of thing around people her age when they weren't involved in criminal enterprises - but the majority of her work had been done in Sweden, and it was hard not to swear when you'd been shot by a nine-year-old girl. "The same one as before?"

"Can't tell," Maddox said back. "I can hear the horn and the dogs are on the prowl, though, so I'm out." Kirsi's subconscious immediately translated it from the code that they used - hunting horn meant the police were on the scene, and dogs meant that META was too. Maddox had better leave, because if he was identified as a mutant and a wanted criminal, Kirsi might be compromised too.

"Leave, now," she said, and Maddox only muttered his assent before disappearing. That was what she liked about his power - there was no pomp and circumstance whatsoever. He was there, and then he wasn't. It was quiet and nobody would see him coming.

Kirsi focused on the scene below in the courtyard again. The police seemed to be checking for weapons and invitations, and while she could pass off her lack of invitation by claiming her dad had it, it was hard to pretend a sniper scope was anything but. And if META suspected her, well, she couldn't hide her DNA. But if another assassin really had stolen her kill - not that the man hadn't deserved it; he'd been bribing people to keep quiet about META's numerous failings and ordering hits on those who refused to comply - it was, in all likelihood, the assassin she'd seen before.

So, while she could play it safe, she was going to place her bets on the fact that she was a nine-year-old girl to protect her. If need be, that courtyard was right by the edge of the cliff, and she would be one of the very few people who could comfortably survive that fall without a scratch, and, in fact, end up more powerful for it.

She dodged out of the room she'd been watching from, tucking the comm and the scope back into the purse, burying it beneath an American Girl doll, a little, rather angry-looking stuffed puppy, and numerous changes of clothes for the doll. (The puppy was a joke. She still thought Mad Dog was a hilarious code name.) Making her way down the stairs and to the courtyard, she was only stopped by one policeman who saw her wandering and asked, seemingly worried, about where her parents were. Kirsi just shrugged and told him that her dad was somewhere at the party, and easily lost him in the crowd when he tried to keep her from seeing the dead body. Nice thought, but she needed to confirm the kill by sight herself.

And that was the bastard, all right. She frowned almost apathetically at the body, still concealed by the faux horrified (but really morbidly fascinated) people surrounding it, before weaving through the hordes of people again. It wasn't hard to find the interloper - he was standing with his back to her when she found him, and so it was easy enough to almost materialize behind him without him realizing.

"You know," she said, in her childish, almost angelic voice, "it's not nice to play with other people's things."

She was holding a pen in her hand, and seconds later it was on the tiled courtyard, coated in blood. Her hand was pointed at the back of the man's leg.

She was not happy with this situation, and she was decently sure that what she'd done had made that very clear.

As the door opened, Kirsi recited the same mantra she'd said at every door - "Hi! I'm selling cookies for the Girl Scouts of America. Would you like to buy some?" She didn't noticed until she'd finished that the man looked rather miserable - though he did perk up a bit at the mention of Girl Scout cookies - until he looked up and saw her face and turned very, incredibly pale, and froze. She could've sworn that, had it been snowing outside, the man would've camouflaged flawlessly. He'd gone that pale.

Kirsi frowned slightly at him. He looked rather sick. She had the nagging feeling that she'd seen the man before, but couldn't really know for sure, so she just brushed it off. New York was full of people, and she'd probably just passed him on the street at some point in time. His bright hair was pretty distinctive.

There was a long pause, during which Kirsi exchanged a rather confused glance with Maddox. Hungover, the man mouthed at her. Probably trying not to puke.

She made a sort of 'oh' face, and turned back to face the potential customer.

"Mornin'," he finally said after a very, very long pause. She waited for him to say something else, but he didn't seem very inclined to speak more. So she decided to speak instead.

"Would you like to order some cookies?" she asked energetically, and a little bit more loudly, because she knew very little about hangovers and automatically assumed that being louder might help. As she reached into her pocket to pull out the list they'd been given, a quarter fell out. "Oh, oops!" she said, and bent over to pick it up. She palmed it with the sort of dexterity not usually found in nine year old girls, making the coin seemingly disappear. Hey, years of using pretty much nothing but coins meant that she'd taught herself a few tricks at some point, if only out of sheer boredom when waiting somewhere on a mission.

Kirsi wasn't a hundred percent sure what Panu was trying to do.

He'd dragged her all over the city to find these new META bots, and she was glad that she had dodged a bullet (not the best idiom to use, but the idea was the same) by not getting tagged by that bot at the park. Because otherwise, this little expedition of theirs would've been difficult. She wasn't entirely sure what Panu was trying to accomplish, or why he'd hired her to accompany him. She supposed he could be reprogramming them to do something - what, though, she didn't know, because it wasn't her place to ask.

She just really hoped that the pay was worth it.

---

Panu was trying oh so very hard to get back in Ambrose's favor, but the man wasn't budging that easily. The incident in Finland had dropped his confidence levels in the tiny technopath greatly, because if he couldn't even be trusted to research the defense, how could he be trusted to do anything else? Contrary to what Panu seemed to believe, Ambrose had noticed the Faust situation. And he approved of the Faust situation. It just wasn't enough to even make Ambrose talk to him again. No, if Panu wanted to become Ambrose's golden boy again, he'd have to do something big.

Ambrose had been held up on his way back from work thanks to a bit of a complication - some idiot had recruited someone with no interest in joining Ragnarok, and every interest in sabotaging it. Said someone had tried to get into the base to sabotage something, but thankfully, Cail had been there and had rather easily dispatched of him. Ambrose had had to stay behind for the interrogation part of things, but thankfully, they'd wrapped up soon. Information was gathered, the body was disposed of, and that was that. The infiltrator had posed no real serious threat, seeing as he'd been a Bird Hunter spy, and the Bird Hunters were laughable.

So when he got home, he was already in a particularly good mood. He supposed that said something about himself as a person, but he didn't particularly care. And that was the only reason he humored Panu as the boy dragged him outside, insisting that they were going somewhere. He hadn't brought any work home that night, either, so he surprisingly good-naturedly ducked behind a tree to shift back to his natural state. He didn't even noticed the girl until he ducked out, in his full dragon form, and realized that there was not one, but two white-haired children. They looked almost like siblings, so he was very suspicious at first, until Panu explained who she was as he clambered onto Ambrose's back.

---

Kirsi had been out of sight when the man Panu referred to as his father had entered, before being promptly dragged off, but she had left the house in time to hear the somewhat disturbing noises coming from behind the tree before a dragon stepped out. Panu introduced him as Jörmungandr - he'd mentioned that name multiple times before, but it was rather unnerving to see the veritable monster that towered above her.

"Renegade," it said critically, staring down at her. There was a brief moment during which Kirsi tried very hard to tamp down her fear, but that was just scaring her a bit more, until he finally said, "Are you just going to stand there?" Immediately, Kirsi clambered onto the dragon's back, right behind Panu.

---

Finally, they were taking off, though Ambrose had no idea where he was going. His good mood had been slightly ruined by the sight of the interloper, but no matter - maybe Panu was actually going to do something impressive now.

"So where are we going?" he asked, as they flew towards the city. He probably should've asked that earlier.

He was apologizing and everything. How nice of him. Americans had no concept of basic decency, unlike the Scandinavians - Kirsi had fought a Tuonela member once who had apologized when he killed the Black Rose member accompanying Kirsi on a mission. She'd picked up that habit from the anonymous man, and now said "beklager, tilgi meg," to every person she killed as a sort of ritual, whether out loud or in her head. "I'm sorry, please forgive me." It was her way of still staying as good as she could, in a way.

This mask, though - his Ragnarok mask? She agreed that being seen with your real face was stupid, which was why she preferred to go at things stealthily. It just wasn't hard for people to realize that an abnormal-looking white-haired child was at the scene of every hit. It didn't even matter if she wore a mask - the rest of her was rather obvious. But maybe what this Ragnarok did was more public. Maybe they were statement killers. She couldn't tell.

She was pleasantly surprised to see that Panu had had the foresight to bring her a matching mask, since that sort of coordination often ended up being more intimidating. As she took it, though, she noticed that it seemed to be a lot leaner and less bulky than Panu's, but she didn't comment.

The boy sat down. Then stood back up again. Then offered her a seat.

She was starting to miss Scandinavia, where everyone was so polite. These Americans were all so... brutish.

She took a seat on the grimy bench, inwardly recoiling a bit because Americans were rather unsanitary too, and waited as Panu ruffled through his backpack. She could hear something clanking around inside, and he pulled out a tablet and handed it to her. It was blank. The screen suddenly started to fill up with files, though, and Kirsi felt a little bit of excitement at seeing a technomancer work. She'd always thought that would be a rather fun power.

The mission sounded cut-and-dry. The only problem was murdering the research assistants. They hadn't done anything to warrant her killing them. And if Panu was as big of a fan of hers and he acted, he should know that. That had been the tiny piece of her humanity that she clung to, and she wasn't willing to relinquish it yet or ever.

As he spoke, Kirsi flipped through the files on the tablet, skimming them and doing her best to retain as much information as she could in the short amount of time they had. Sure, Panu could likely access them with a though, but if they got separated or something, it was good for her to know her way around. It also seemed as if he was unsure about killing the scientists too, but was acting as if he wanted to avoid doing so for logical reasons.

"I agree," Kirsi responded, humoring Panu's 'totally out of pure logic' comment. "Also, there is no need to kill them. Unneeded casualties make clean jobs messy." In more ways than one. She continued to flip through the tablet's files. "So we scare Faust's scientists into leaving? Easy. All I need to know is how to get to their houses."

As they walked to their destination - this tunnel had apparently been picked for its conveniently close location to the neighborhood where quite a few of the scientists lived - Kirsi filled Panu in on her plan. Her power imitated sniper shots perfectly, and she could produce a facsimile of a bomb by overstoring energy into something. It wouldn't be anywhere near as deadly as the real deal, but it would send a message fine. Getting attacked by a sniper or a bomber seemed like perfectly good motivation to leave your job, and the fact that that was their intent could easily be conveyed via Panu's power. If that didn't scare them, their bank accounts and credit cards getting frozen probably would. It was a vague-ish plan, of course - it wasn't in anywhere near the amount of detail she'd like, but she assumed Panu would make some changes as they went, and it would be on a relatively case-by-case basis.

Soon, they arrived at the first apartment building. According to the tablet she'd been reading, this one was on the twenty-sixth floor, in a corner room.

"Should we go into the neighboring building?" Kirsi asked Panu, inspecting said building critically. "Better vantage point there. But if we go into the building itself, I can set a few 'bombs,' if he isn't yet awake."

”Ms. Korsavlys,” the boy said, and he knew who she was.

He was giving her details on the mission, but she wasn’t listening because her head was pounding. Who was this boy? How did he know who she was? But as she put the pieces together, her mind started to calm down, even if her face and body language project the same apathetic, unconcerned facade that it always did.

The boy’s accent was Finnish. Her old home had been right next to the border, so she was very closely acquainted with what that sounded like. So it meant that, already, the likelihood of him having heard of her went up. Considering the manhunt after all the mission files, all of which she had rather incriminatingly signed “complete” on, it was not that surprising at all. The boy seemed younger than her, however, and he was hiring her, so she doubted he’d come across who she was through natural means. Maybe he was part of a different crime syndicate?

"I am not undercover,” she said cautiously. "If you know who I am then you will know I have not been for a long time. And I will do the mission - two days or more is not important. But I do not go by Railgun anymore. Or Valdyr. I am Renegade, and my name is Kirsi Crux.” She scanned him, up and down, trying to figure out who precisely he was. ”Are you former Black Rose? No, otherwise I would know your face and not just you know mine… Tuonela, perhaps? They are Finnish, correct? I would very much like to know who you work for.”

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.