[LN] Dangerously Genre-Savvy [closed to Nico]

[othersdestructive]

"Inspector!" Rafa cried out, as the Inspector's ship crash landed in the purple jungles of Khalafross. Clad in his traditional animal skins, he was an imposing figure, even despite the fact that the Inspector was taller than him. "The danger light blinks! Rafa can see with the eyes of the ship! Our most hated enemy comes for us: Blorgons!"

Native to the planet Tumantis, Rafa was one of the Tessujex, a subgroup of the people known as the Suveteem. In the Inspector's adventures, he had discovered that the Suvateem were actually descendant of a crashed space exploration survey team. (Their name, in fact, was what "survey team" had devolved into over the centuries). The Tessujex had evolved from the animals on board that had accidentally been exposed to mutagens during the crash and developed human intelligence. (Hence the name Tessujex, a twisted version of the words "test subjects.")

After the Tessujex were used as slave labor for centuries, the Inspector was responsible for making the Suveteem realize that the humanoids among them were not the superior species they'd once thought they were and that their claim that they were descended from the gods was false, the Tessujex finally had a chance of being treated equal in their society. After that, Rafa, one of the Tessujex's most noble warriors and resistance fighters had declared that he would follow the Inspector to the end of time until the debt could be repaid, especially if it meant the Inspector could teach him the ways of peace after a lifetime of battle.

"We must leave! Quickly! And fight them in the jungle. Rafa knows the way!"

They had no way of defending themselves on the ship and there was no way to repair it while the Blorgons were on board.

Comments

[othersdestructive]

It had blurred. That meant - it meant it had gone on. There was time that had to be skipped in this horrible vision.

After Nico's spell - her curse - Raph only cast one fleeting glance back at the screaming old woman and far from looking disgusted, the look her shot her way was one of vindictive satisfaction. Raph was not really one for mercy and in his eyes, the fact she was still breathing enough to scream was mercy enough. It was more mercy than he'd have shown.

Heck, this was a situation where even someone like Splinter or Leo might've decided someone needed to be taken out of the world. Especially if they'd thought good and hard about all the blood and torture tools in this room.

Without any further hesitation, he ran out the door after Nico, chasing after her, tugging at her elbow to slow her down so he could face her. He wanted to grab her up in a hug but after seeing all that, seeing her so shackled down and helpless and raw, he wasn't sure she'd be up for him really touching her.

"Nico, stop! Stop! We gotta get you out of this!"

Before this horrible memory could drag her into even more old hurt.

[staff_and_wielder]

The burning glow of the magic in her eyes snapped off when he spun her around as if he had thrown a switch. When what occurred in this memory had actually taken place, her magic had just submerged itself under her skin and she'd come back to herself the same way someone woke up on a day they didn't need to set an alarm clock. This was more a wake-up by cold-water dousing.

Oh God. He'd seen that.

She cried out and flung the Staff away from her, dropping to the floor and burying her face in her hands so she wouldn't have to see what he thought of what she'd done. It was the cowardly way out, sure, but she couldn't face him right now. She couldn't bear to see the disgust he must be feeling with her.

The passageway dissolved, transforming into a whirl of memory snapshots. Not chasing the rabbit again, but other things she'd prefer people not see.

Nico standing contemptuously over an older man and woman, pulling the Staff back after casting a spell. The woman was openly weeping.

Nico dragging Molly away from a burning building while Molly dug in her heels and protests, pointing back the way they'd come.

Nico in winter gear, planting a kiss on a startled-looking blond boy before he angrily shoved her away.

Nico slinging a spell at the same boy before being attacked by a featherless deinonychus as Molly was grabbed and dragged into a van.

[othersdestructive]

He watched it all, face impassive, mostly just to see what she was afraid of, why she was hiding her face. As each vision flashed, he didn't need to see the whole situation to understand what they were about. Their minds were literally hooked together through the Drift, which probably wasn't actually real but whatever magic was behind this little adventure made the link real enough.

He felt them as if he was the one that had lived them, her feelings, but filtered slightly through the lens of what his own would've been facing the same things. It all bled together in the Drift, especially since so much of it was rooted in something Raph understood intimately: protecting one's own.

- they'd have to watch as events played out, unable to say goodbye to the daughter they knew they were going to lose, after setting up so many to die, playing games with their lives, after trying to kill the whole world, after launching their daughter into the same life that got her killed by being evil -

- despite not trusting him (her?) Raph had still decided to go back for Xavin, because protecting your own wasn't the only thing in this world and 'your own' sometimes had to be extended to new people if people you loved loved them -

- confused and exhilarated over surviving, he just wanted comfort, wanted to feel normal things, wasn't thinking, didn't mean to hurt Gert, why did he always run to the arms of the nearest warm body? Was there something wrong with him? Was it -

- it was always a mess and these were supposed to be his friends but they kept doing this, getting caught up in their own drama and he shouldn't have kissed Chase, what if something happened to Molly, it'd be all his fault -

Guilt and shame and guilt and so many normal, normal feelings. Lost feelings. The kinds of feelings someone had when their whole world got upended and they thought they were a worse person than they actually were.

"Nico." Raph knelt down next to her and pulled her in for a tight hug. His voice was soft. "Oh, Nico."

It wasn't disappointment, it wasn't accusation, it was sadness over how sad she was and she'd feel it practically radiating off him, his wanting her to be happy. He held her with no hidden motives, nothing he wanted from her, just beaming out all he wanted to give, comfort and security and friendship and kindness and understanding.

"What'd I tell you before? I was right, y'know. You're so normal. Mixed up feelings from a mixed up life and you don't even realize how okay that is, do you?" his voice was incredibly gentle. "It's alright. You've got nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of."

[staff_and_wielder]

Nico held her breath, trying to will herself away from here or, failing that, just vanish. If she hadn't been so drained from reliving that memory, she might have had the sense to stay on her feet so she could run -- but where could she run here, where their minds were linked?

Then he crouched down and pulled her into a hug and she dared to part her fingers and peek.

"It's not okay," she said, muffled by her hands. "I'm not supposed to be like that. I'm gonna turn out like--"

She bit her tongue, but there were things that you didn't have to say out loud when you were locked in a mind-share with someone.

--my parents.

Another snapshot memory: Nico, standing in an empty club, wiping her blood onto a mirror she held in her hands, hoping for some way to bring back a stupid dead boy who wasn't worth much but hadn't deserved to die. Instead, her reflection rippled and resolved into that of her mother.

"You'll always be one of us, Nico."

[othersdestructive]

"You gave extremely karmically appropriate punishments to a serial torturer and two psychopathic crime lords that wanted to mass murder all life on earth. And you were a little too loose with the lips and the hormones, whoop de freakin' doo."

Still holding onto her, he looked her in the eyes.

"You're nothing like your parents. Not even a bit. Look, your however-many-greats-grandma? Evil. It wasn't even like you just wished torture on her, you wished the harm she put out in the world on her. If she hadn't been such a horrible person, the spell would've just made it rain puppies or something. As for the Yorkes, what you did to them was perfectly fine, and you know why?"

He gave her shoulders a squeeze with his hands before pulling her back into a full blown hug again, face to face.

"They were willing to mass murder more people than Hitler. This isn't even like one of those internet arguments where someone unfairly compares someone to Hitler all heavy-handed trying to win the argument through the debate equivalent of a sledgehammer. It's actually a perfectly reasonable comparison. And did Hitler deserve worse than he got? Heck yeah. They were lucky that was all they got. They were worse than Nazis. They hated everybody and were so selfish they didn't care what happened to the whole world. Even without managing to, y'know, end all life on Earth, they still killed how many innocent people?"

He touched his forehead to hers, sifting through the context that he'd absorbed.

"How many innocent girls?"

[staff_and_wielder]

"...Twenty."

Not to mention everyone who'd died in the explosion they'd set off while Nico was leaving the Witchbreaker to her fate, or anyone else they'd killed in the near-infinite amount of time they had access to with their time machine. But she'd done the math and there were twenty girls who'd walked into the Wilders' basement and come out corpses -- and nineteen of them hadn't even been that after the Gibborim were through with them. Nineteen girls that their parents -- her parents -- had excised from reality for money and power and immortality for them and/or their children.

"...I planned it, though," she whispered. "After I wiped Mr. Wilder's memories and sent him back, I sat down and I planned what I'd do the next time we met any of our parents again. I didn't do it because they were bad people, I did it because they hurt me and I wanted to make them pay."

[othersdestructive]

"Yeah, welcome to being human." A pause. "Says the giant talking turtle."

Still touching his forehead to hers, he shook his head slightly. "Do you think I wanna kill Shredder because he helped aliens invade my planet blah blah hero stuff or because he killed my dad and beat my brother into a coma? That's not even getting into how many times he beat the snot out of me, my brothers, and Sensei before all that, or how he kidnapped Sensei's daughter that I grew up watching him mourn over and raised her to hate him, or how he killed Sensei's wife."

He shrugged. "I hate the guy. As much as someone like me can hate. My brothers hate him, too, even Mikey and Leo - and Mikey don't have a hateful bone in his body otherwise. Even Mikey's ready and willing to stomp him. That's how it works, there's no way you can untangle the personal stuff from the big picture - and the personal stuff doesn't change the big picture. The Yorkes, your parents, your other friends' parents, would've ended it all. Every little kid on the face of the Earth. Every decent parent, every good cop, every firefighter, every brave soldier, every honest lawyer, every person that was fearless enough to stand in front of a tank at a protest against some evil dictator. Every pizza parlor, skateboard park, piece of art, every song, everything and everyone. They were willing to burn it all. And the fact it was personal was because they were willing to burn you too, were willing to mess with their own kids - and that just made 'em more deserving of horrible consequences."

[staff_and_wielder]

Nico chuckled weakly at his little joke about a mutated turtle commentating on humanity, but she couldn't maintain a smile beyond that.

"When we fought those witches over Halloween," she said, "the one I fought said there was a darkness in me. She said I should be on their side."

She'd hissed and spat at the idea of course, but the words had still been spoken. She'd been trying to figure them out for months.

Explain that away, Raph. Please, explain it away.

[othersdestructive]

"Maybe what her hagginess picked up on was your anger. Or your pain. Maybe it was your doubt over your choices. Maybe it was that you see yourself as bad sometimes even though you're not, like it's something you can't escape." A pause. He bobbled his head back and forth as he considered something else. "Or maybe it was the fact you carry around a giant kind-of-obviously-evil magic staff and dark magic passed down from your evil parents. The vibe I've gotten from your whole blood magic shtick is that the magic itself is a little wild, maybe something bad people could make bad uses of."

He stared her in the eye. "But you get to choose what to do with it. The anger, the hurt, the magic, all of it. Having it in there doesn't make you bad. Everyone's got that crazy mix of stuff inside them, even if not everyone has the magic part of it."

He licked his lips, trying to figure out how to say what he wanted to say. "When it comes to choices, Sensei always used to tell us that the first rule of being a ninja was to do no harm." Dramatic pause. "Then the second rule was that if we had to do harm that we should do lots of harm. He taught us it's okay to hurt people sometimes and it's even okay to kill them sometimes. It's okay to be angry and even sometimes okay to act on it if you don't let it rule your whole life or make it so you make mistakes in a fight. It depends on which people you go after, when, and how, but sometimes it's the right thing to do. Sometimes people deserve it and if there's nothing else out there that can drop the hammer on them, it's left to whoever's just...there."

He gave her a small smile. "And if there's one thing my very brief and complete disaster of turn leading my brothers taught me, it was that it's hard being the one in the spot to make those calls, and, unlike you, I was even trained at this stuff. Having to make 'em can sometimes feel like anything you choose has to be wrong. But that's just 'cause you're you're not ready to make 'em and you're not the kind of person that's ready to carry that weight, not because those choices are actually wrong. People like my brother are the ones that can live with those choices better 'cause they know themselves better than people like us. All the feelings and stuff that make it hard to judge if it's the right choice are things people like him can push aside to see the closest thing to truth."

He shook his head again. "But there is no single truth. There's...there's a lot more greys than people like to admit. There isn't even a way to handle everything you had to handle that would've been objectively right because morality ain't like that. It's not like Space Wars where doing things out of anger makes you turn evil and there's always one right, perfect thing to do."

His hands slid to her upper arms to rub them comfortingly. "With all the pain and suffering those people put into the world, they deserved some kinda awful thing back. You're not a bad person for making them feel some of what they put into the world, and when you were one of the people caught up in that great big tidal wave of pain they created you had even more of a right to nail 'em to the wall for it. And it's even more understandable when you did most of that right after being horribly tortured so you were riding high on that pain."

Now it was time to bring it all home.

"So, basically, I think Witchy whats-her-face was a blowhard working on your self-doubt and the fact you have creepy blood magic that she probably sensed and wanted on her side." He gave her a small smile. "Now, you can take her word for it, when she knew you all of three seconds and had good reason to mess with your head to try to lure a powerful witch over to her side. Or you can take the word of the guy that's been hanging out with you almost every day since he met you who's currently hooked into your brain right now and isn't getting overwhelmed by any evil pouring out."

He shrugged. "Your call."

[staff_and_wielder]

Wow. That was quite a bit more than Nico had expected. She smiled at him, and this time it didn't go to pieces after a bare few seconds. Then she looked away to wipe at her eyes.

"Well," she said, "I suppose that makes sense." A beat, another, shyer, smile. "Thanks."

[othersdestructive]

He wrapped his arms around her, hugging her as tightly as his shell would comfortably allow.

"Listen, I can't say you're the toughest person I've ever met because I haven't met that many people so it wouldn't really mean anything. But what I can say is I think you're one of the toughest people I'm ever going to meet. And I'm glad I met you. And I think you've dealt with all this stuff a whole lot better than you realize."

A pause.

"In other words: you're welcome."

Then, without even thinking about it - or rather, without over-thinking about it since this was all taking place in their heads - he pressed a gentle, comforting kiss to her forehead.

[staff_and_wielder]

Nico hugged him back, though not quite a firmly due to the awkward edges of his shell. Soap bubble memories rose and burst around them -- Nico, still wearing her glasses, posing in front of a floor-length mirror with a thoughtful expression as she examined the T-shirt she'd modified into a hooded tank top. She pulled the hood up over her shoulder-length hair and smiled.

Nico, a little older, dropping the Staff of One to throw her arms around a glowing girl in a torn but still beautiful black and gold dress. The girl flung her arms around Nico in turn, pulling her close.

Nico in her awkward early teens presenting a chubby dark-haired girl with a hand-sewn purple scarf. The girl jumped up and ran to the mirror to wrap the scarf around her neck and turned back to Nico, beaming.

Nico, still awkward, riding the escalator and the mall up and down and up and down as long as she wanted, because she was old enough to go to the mall on her own and that meant no one was there to tell her to stop riding the escalator and get a move on.

Nico, barely school-aged, carefully filling a plastic bucket with beach sand and carrying it back to a group of other children and tipping it over to build another turret on their sand castle.

[othersdestructive]

Raph wasn't sure why it was happening, the good memories blinking and disappearing but maybe it was because they'd helped each other escape the painful trap that had been set for them and now good things were taking the place of the bad ones.

Or maybe...maybe it was because being with her made happy memories from times past bubble up to the surface because the feelings were so similar. But did that mean he made her feel the same way?

It flashed around them, his first view of the city above, the city lights flickering in his eyes and the eyes of his brothers, after fifteen years underground.

"It's so beeeeaaautiful," Mikey had gasped in awe and Raph couldn't help but agree. It was the most beautiful sight he'd ever seen.

Raph's first taste of pizza, on a roof after he and his brothers picked up a dropped pizza from a pizza boy they'd frightened. He cried out, "I never thought I'd taste anything better than worms and algae but this is amazing!"

His first taste of ice cream, around the table with his brothers, after April had brought them down some. A fighter over what was left that devolved to an ice cream fight that got them all grounded for three days (alongside having to clean up the kitchen.)

The time they were eight and they'd played 'the floor is lava' and Raph had done the impossible. The goal had been to get to the entrance pool but the only way there was through a field of precarious furniture and toys. Raph managed to flip from a busted coffee table, balance on one foot on a busted up tricycle they were now all far too big for, flip onto a skateboard, and rode it backward all the way into the pool, his momentum taking him the rest of the way there.

His brothers all did that excitable "OOOOH!" thing kids do when a friend or sibling pulled off the hilariously impossible, because they actually managed to pull it off, and Raph rose from the water for a dramatic bow.

"Thank you, thank you, yes I know that I'm that awesome, thank you."

His and his brothers' first snow. Back when they were smaller and still experimented with clothes, back when they still sometimes got cold. They were eleven and they'd been playing in the sewers, finally allowed to do it unsupervised by Sensei as long as they stayed in the runoff and fresh water maintenance pipes and not the raw sewage ones, and as long as they avoided the more dangerous junctions with running water. They were bundled up in a mish-mash of discarded clothing, everything from overalls, to hawaiian shirts, to things like parts of fast food uniforms. Mikey, for instance, was wearing a tulle skirt over top his overalls and a floppy sun hat.

"What is it?" Raph had gasped as the tiny, delicate, puffs of...stuff danced its way down through a large sewer grate. It had coated the floor of the sewer in a heavy drift - apparently the storm going on above was rather fierce. So far the snow was still so fresh most of it was pristine, still not turned black by runoff. One of the little flakes landed on Raph's snout, making him sniff in surprise.

It was a moment of pure, undiluted childlike wonder.

"I saw this on TV!" Mikey exclaimed, somehow even more excitable in the past then than he was now in the present. "It's in all the Christmas specials. I think it's called..." He paused dramatically and gave a flare of his hands. "Snoo."

"It's snow, dummy," said Donnie. "I read about it in one of my books. It's precipitation in the form of flakes of crystalline water that falls -" he was interrupted by a snowball to the face, thrown by Raph. "Hey!"

As Raph laughed so hard he nearly fell over, Leonardo grinned and made a snowball himself, "Oh, it is so on."

Then things dissolved into the biggest, fiercest - and funnest - no-holds-barred snowball fight any New York sewer had ever seen.

And it was all so...appropriate. Being here with her felt like...well...

Home.

[staff_and_wielder]

Home. That'd be nice.

And very suddenly, the two of them were back in their bodies (or in the human facsimile Raph was inhabiting) in a moment of free fall as the helicopters turned them loose into the ocean.

The ocean where a giant glowing monster waited for them.

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" Nico screamed. It seemed an appropriate contribution to the event.

[othersdestructive]

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Apparently, it was an appropriate contribution because Raph contributed it too.

They landed in a giant spray of ocean waves.

"How do we control this thing?! I've only controlled one giant mech so far and it wasn't anything like this!"

[staff_and_wielder]

"I don't even pilot the Leapfrog!" Nico shrieked over the the progressively more furious questions being spat out over the radio from back at base. "I have no idea how to control this thing!"

So of course, that was the moment the Kaiju roared up out of the water, all claws and billowing fins and jagged fangs in a gaping mouth. Nico shrieked again, somehow even higher than before; and only one thought flashed through the frozen terror of her mind:

Hit it!

She reflexively flung a wild punch at it, even though she was inside the giant robot where there was no way for her to hit it.

[othersdestructive]

The punch landed and the most it did was knock the monster back slightly but at least that meant they now knew how the robot worked.

Ignoring the buzz of command (people that probably weren't even real), Raph experimentally thew a much harder, more direct punch at the creature's...head-like appendage. It knocked it back into the water.

"Hey, I think the mech does what we do!"

And because they were linked up, they didn't even have to talk to work together on it.

"I don't know how we got here but I've got a feeling we have to go through this thing to get out."

We can do this.

The two of them, together? Of course they could do this.

"But if we're going to, you need to punch a whole lot harder."

[staff_and_wielder]

The Raph-lead punch was definitely better than the one Nico had thrown -- her body had followed along with Raph's because of the way their minds were connected. His confidence was likewise contagious.

"I don't think it has a dead wife, and I'm fresh out of shapeshifters anyway," she answered. "So if we're gonna punch this thing back into the watery grave it came out of, I'm gonna follow your lead on this."

She caught movement out of the corner of her eye.

"Here it comes again!"

[othersdestructive]

"And there it goes again," Raph joked as he kicked it, hard, knocking it back into the water. Then he stepped on it, pinning with the robot's foot that he was controlling and did the "one" part of a one-two punch.

Which meant Nico had to follow up with the "two." Fortunately, in Nico's head there suddenly came the knowledge of how to throw a proper punch, and it was more than just instructions, it was as if she had the muscle memory herself, zipping into her brain faster than light.

Thumb outside the fist, knuckles out to cause more damage, not the flats of the fingers, make sure your reach goes two inches behind what you're punching, keep the wrist straight -

All of his dedication (because yes, he did actually do push ups balanced on his sai handles back home), all the pride over what he could do (because he was just that good), all the lessons and experience were there for her to work with.

She had his strength to add to her own.

[staff_and_wielder]

Punching monsters while wearing a giant suit of armor didn't hurt Nico's knuckles nearly as much as punching her ex-boyfriend had (and it sure as hell hurt her heart less). She whooped aloud as she let Raph's knowledge lead her through the movement, aiming for somewhere behind the kaiju's head.

"HYAAAA!"

The kaiju seemed to be having less fun than she was, though. It launched itself up at them with a roar that she could hear through the crashing waves and the various mechanical whines and klaxons in the jaeger, seizing the head of the mecha in its clawed hands and attempting to yank it loose.

"AHHHHH!"

[othersdestructive]

"That sounds like the opposite of good."

There was a horrible crunch above them as the head of the jaeger was torn clean off. Fortunately, the Conn-pod was in its chest, but they lost some functionality as the klaxons blared and the sparks flew everywhere.

"Nico, use the staff! You have some kinda staff thing on your side, right?"

A one-shot wonder. Enough of the false memories lingered that she might be able to use it.

It was their last shot before this thing got trashed.

[staff_and_wielder]

"AHHHHH!" Nico suggested helpfully. Geez, why did they make those klaxons so loud; did they think that they wouldn't notice the head of their giant fighting robot being ripped off without all that additional racket?

She fumbled around for a panicky moment before she found the controls for the staff thing. She wasn't really practiced at staffs that weren't magical, and while Raph did have some training with a staff, it wasn't his specialty -- especially not one that also had a one-shot blast that could come out of one end. Nico drove the staff forward at the kaiju with a shout, triggering the explosive at the tip as she did so.

If the damn thing was just a little slower, she would have had it!

[othersdestructive]

It veered just enough to avoid the center mass but the blast took off the kaiju's arm in a viscous spray of...hydraulic fluid?

For just a moment as the lightning flashed, the kaiju suddenly looked less like a monster and more like another jaeger, in black armor with horns that made it look like a bat-eared cowl -

Not that Raph knew it, because he didn't know what Batman was, but that was what it looked like. Batman.

As the other jaeger rallied, he and Nico briefly heard a voice - a single voice - over the other jaeger's intercom.

"Troy and Abed in a jaaaeger!"

It was the same reedy voice as earlier, during that brief flash of the other Han Solo and the other Inspector, and the sound of it was jogging something in Raph's brain.

"That guy - he's that guy we saw earlier! He's - he's why we're here - I think? Either we were supposed to bring him in or take him down, but I still can't remember which or how we got into this!"

It was still too fuzzy and they had no time to untangle the situation because the other jaeger turned back into a kaiju again - and it raised a fist and shot globs of something glowing at their Conn-pod.

The front of the Conn-pod exploded, sending metal shrapnel everywhere. Fortunately, their Drivesuits were sturdy enough to take the beating, but the jaeger was already on its last legs. As the jaeger stumbled backwards, putting some space between them and the "kaiju" it turned so the exposed Conn-pod was pointing away from the kaiju, giving them time.

Wires were sparking everywhere, alarms were blaring, displays were flashing red with "CRITICAL SYSTEMS FAILURE" messages. Some of the electronics and hydraulics were failing as coolant and other fluids spewed from broken pipes and tubes.

There was no way they were going to win this, especially when they only half knew what they were doing now that the illusion was broken. So Raph did what any good ninja would do and what any good jaeger pilot wouldn't it, and ripped himself free from his mount, pulling tubes and wires away until he was free to move through the cockpit.

The moment he ripped off his helmet, the strange fluid inside spilling everywhere as he coughed the rest out of his lungs, he suddenly changed back to his true form (albeit still in his drivesuit). It was as if him no longer playing along meant the illusion was suddenly broken. Now that he no longer fully fit the mold of an unstoppable jaeger pilot that never gave up and had reverted back to being a ninja that knew when to cut and run, it was goodbye human jaeger pilot, hello teenage mutant ninja turtle.

"We need to abandon ship! Try to get out of this - this - whatever it is, like we did before!" he cried out, voice ragged from coughing, as he stumbled over to Nico to help her detach, too.

As the jaeger listed in place, he stumbled and slammed right into her. He could hear the heavy choom choom choom of the approaching kaiju. They only had a few seconds to abandon ship - a minute, tops.

[staff_and_wielder]

Nico hoped they were here to take that guy down. He was having way too much fun putting her in dangerous situations for her to be in much of a mood for a rescue.

She struggled out of the clamps attached to her suit with Raph's help -- a lot of Raph's help, since she'd used up most of her residual memories to get the staff to work. She fumbled with her helmet until it unlocked, the red streaks dyed into her hair running out with the weird liquid that had been inside.

When the jaeger listed and Raph fell against her, she latched onto his shell as hard as she could.

"I can't swim in that!" she shrieked over the sound of the wind and the waves below them. Scuba training had not prepared her for high dives into stormy seas.

[othersdestructive]

Unfortunately, they didn't have time to get out of the suits in the jaeger. A massive kaiju hand suddenly loomed up, heaving towards the hole in their Conn-pod, about to slam into what was left of it.

"No time!" Raph screamed, yanking her along by the hand towards the gaping hole and then bodily yanking her out with him as he jumped out. The kaiju hand slammed right through the hole in the Conn-pod with a sickening crunch the moment they were clear.

"HOLD YOUR BREATH - FEET DOWN!" Raph cried over the shriek of the wind as they dropped like stones, still holding onto her so they'd plummet in together and not be separated by the waves raging around the failing jaeger and raging kaiju.

They sank like stones, too, the swirl of the waves buffeting them around wildly under the water, but ultimately failing at pushing them towards the surface. At the very least, they were ripped away from the fight, meaning they had at least a chance of not getting crushed.

They could barely see each other in the dim light under the water, but as the jaeger sank in the distance, its external lights gave them at least some light to work by. In the other direction were other lights above the surface, as if there was a coastal city not far off in the distance.

But the only chance they had of getting to it was getting their suits off and surfacing before they drowned so they could swim to it.

Raph started to tear off his suit furiously. Fortunately, now that they were away from the jaeger and the little bubble of reality around it, it was much easier to get out of the suits than it should have been.

But could they do it fast enough?