INCOMPLETE.

[albedineity]

Who: Heine Rammsteiner (albedineity), Rikku (kleptoness).
What: Heine and Rikku blowing shit up. NOTHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY HERE LOL. Yeah, they're in so much trouble. Note: If any of your characters are around the library at this point, I suggest you move them elsewhere, orrrrrrrrr they're gonna get knocked around by the explosion.
Where: The library.
When: FUTURE

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[kleptoness]

The thief let him look, knowing with slight disappointment that he was just making sure she was dressed appropriately. She knew Heine had something of a phobia towards women, but that didn't mean she had to have a phobia towards him. She knew that one day, one day she would get a hug out of this man, at least. And then a piggy-back ride, because she completely adored piggy-back rides, and she bet he could run really fast with her on his back.

But then he was talking, and she forced herself to pay attention. "Move fast. Got it." Not that she'd ever think of, say, crawling towards the site of a job, but hey, maybe Heine was just preoccupied. He looked like he was thinking pretty hard, though she couldn't even begin to guess about what. He was so secretive, mysterious, that she could never find an opening to figure out what was going through his head. But one day she would, because it was her now-goal in life. It would likely change within the next week or two, but for the moment, she was set.

And it was sort of funny, how she was following him when this was really her field of expertise. But if he wanted to play manly-man and lead the way, she wasn't going to complain. Besides, there were several advantages to trailing behind. First of all, she could study his gait, watch how he walked, embed the sound of his footsteps into her mind. It was habit, more than anything, and she never got to know a person without getting to know their footfalls as well. A person would be surprised at how nice it was to be able to tell who was approaching by the way they walked before they spoke or within sight-range.

Just as she was allowing her mind and eyes to wander towards less proper subjects, the library was looming in front of them, a behemoth outlined in black against a pitch sky.

She paused, tipping her head and eventually entire body backwards to get a good look at the place. "Damn," she murmured, taking a few leap-steps to catch up with Heine. "This is going to be one amazing display, yea?"

[albedineity]

It didn't take long for them to reach the library, but then Heine was especially quick, was especially fast, and every now and then, he'd check his pace with a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure that Rikku was still behind him. She followed behind him pretty closely, all things considered, and every now and then, right when he was sure that she'd want to slow down, she'd surprise him by picking up her pace. But then she wasn't exactly normal, was she, and so maybe his surprise was a little misplaced, but.

Well, they were at the library now, and nothing else really mattered.

He drew to a stop a foot or two away from the door, dropping one of the canisters at his feet as he screwed the lid of the other one off with careful fingers. The library wasn't an especially large building. It was roomy enough, he supposed, for a library, but it was only one floor, and it wouldn't take either of them very long to get their shit done and then get out of there. Smaller buildings were easier to blow up, really, and even if they made less of an impact than larger buildings did, it was still enough to kick up quite of a lot of chaos and a hell of a lot of fire and flying rock.

Gasoline dripped down onto his fingers, sliding over his gloved palm to curve into the line of his wrist as he finally worked the lid off and tossed it aside. It landed on the dirt a few feet away from them, scuffling across the ground until it was stopped by the stone wall of the building. He turned, then, heel digging into the cement beneath him as he moved to face her, and that serious mask finally broke, that look of indifferent calm cracked into the tiniest hint of a smile when he regarded the blonde before him.

"All right," he said, and his voice was as loud as it normally was -- which wasn't very, but it wasn't exactly hushed either. "I'm gonna douse the place. You set up the bombs." He held up his communicator. "Ping me when you're done."

[kleptoness]

The thief had already started pulling a string of explosives from her bag and was heading towards the building. "Yea-huh," she murmured vaguely as she passed him, just missing brushing his arm with hers. She was already half-consumed with the task ahead, spiraled gaze fixated on the bombs in her hand. These were for the outer walls; powerful enough to bust through six feet of concrete, though she doubted the library was that well-guarded.

She crouched near the entrance, and began laying down a path of bombs across either side of the door. They would shatter the main support frame, and then the front would go down hard. After just a few minutes she was back in front of the door, looking at the lock; it didn't look too difficult, five tumblers or so. But there wasn't time to pick it, even though she was the fastest lock-picker on Bikanel. Instead, she pressed the tips of her fingers to the glass and murmured a few words under her breath. In seconds, her yellow-polished nails were lit by a white-hot glow, and the glass began to melt away. She created just one hole, small enough for her to reach through and unlock the door from the other side.

She was inside, and her smile couldn't have been bigger or more devious.

The support beams weren't that difficult to find; they were lined up between the shelves and shelves of books. She felt her blood start rushing, the adrenaline pumping through her veins, and knew she had to hurry. This place made her feel weird, and she knew that soon enough every sound-smell-touch would be intensified until she wouldn't be able to stand it. She had broken in once already, to see what she could see, but hadn't lasted more than ten minutes in the place before she had been forced to leave for fear of passing out.

And so she worked quickly and methodically, strapping dynamite to pillars, plastering c-4 to the walls, placing little clusters of grenades every twenty feet or so along the wall.

Nine minutes and thirty-three seconds; a new personal record. As Heine had requested, she grabbed her tiny communicator and pressed a single button; he was already on her speed-dial. A few hours with the machina and she had figured out pretty much everything about it. Except how to take it apart, but that could come another day.

[albedineity]

Heine didn't even flinch when she came close to touching him, when she brushed by with a focus that he was pretty sure would have been really goddamn hard to break. His breath, however, caught in his lungs a little bit, stuttered in place in his throat as he settled his nerves, as he calmed that part of him that lashed out whenever something like this happened, whenever someone got a little too close when he just wasn't expecting it. Stuttered, fumbled, and then he was fine, then he was okay, because it was just Rikku. It was Rikku, and it didn't matter, it never fucking mattered, so calm the hell down.

"... Right."

His fingers tightened their hold on the canister, and he watched her silently for a second, watched as she slid across the concrete and the dirt to place the bombs on the outside of the building. And then he was moving, too, was kicking open the door to the library (nearly sending it right off its fucking hinges), and carefully stepping inside as he allowed his eyes to focus, as he adjusted to the harsh black that washed over the inside of the building as if it'd never seen the light of day. It didn't take too particularly long, of course, as Heine was used to the dark, was used to the night and all that came with it, and then he was working, boots slipping silently over the wood floors as he tipped the nozzle of the canister down.

The floor was first, and he made sure to trail a line of gasoline right to where Rikku positioned the explosives, before he was starting on the books and the shelves. The scent of gasoline hung heavy in the air, and it might have been sickening, might have been dizzying, but Heine was practically immune to that sort of shit, and he didn't let it slow him down. Over the books, the shelves, the floor, and even the fucking walls, and he didn't stop until nearly every single inch of the library was doused in a thin film of black-brown oil.

He finished a minute or two after Rikku pinged him, and once the last canister was empty, once he was shaking it free of any last droplets of gasoline it might have contained, he let it fall to the floor. Long fingers curled about the communicator in his pocket, and he tugged it out, tugged it free, and spoke three words into it:

"We're done here."

It was all he needed to say, really, and after casting one final look around the place, he moved back outside, waiting at the front of the entrance for Rikku to take her place beside him. He had a match already lit, already waiting, and once she was within his sight, once he was taking note of that familiar face (elegant, and achingly pretty, and sometimes it reminded him of--), he held it out to her wordlessly.

To anyone else, it might not have seemed like much. But for someone like Heine, well. It was the only sign of trust that she was going to get from him, and it was beyond rare, beyond uncommon. It just didn't fucking happen.

Except for right then, apparently.

"Here," he said lightly, and to the careful, to those that observed shit with the trained eyes and ears of someone who didn't miss a whole lot, it might have even seemed gruffly affectionate. "S'time to make our exit."

[kleptoness]

The kerosene practically assaulted her nose, and she felt her throat tighten, her skin crawl. But she had been around so much gasoline in her life that it shouldn't have bothered her, and she knew it, and maybe that was what made her just a slight bit uneasy as she inspected her work, made sure everything was perfect. Because there was no fucking this up; it had to be done right the first time, else it wouldn't count, and it would all just be ruined and the night would've been a bust.

We're done here.

The words cut through the silence of where she was, and she let out a slow, long breath, allowing all the bad thoughts about this to go with it. Because there were other things to worry about, other variables that still had to be sorted out. And she had about half a minute to do all that, because Heine was waiting for her and she knew that if she hated waiting, he most definitely must have loathed it.

The engineer trotted out of the building as if she owned the place (which she pretty much did, now) and smiled widely as she paused just in front of her accomplice because he was doing something she'd never imagined he would.

Flame dancing in the almost nonexistent wind, the match was possibly the most beautiful thing she had seen since arriving in Nuadoria. Not only because it was coming from Heine--distant, quiet, blow-shit-up-because-he-could Heine--but also because she knew the power of something so small. It could burn brightly for a spare moment and then die horribly, or it could be used, shaped, molded into something bigger, something more extravagant.

Something like the library going up in a huge ball of blinding light. And since there was nothing else in the world she wanted to do more, she took the match from him, careful not to actually make physical contact. It had almost burned down to her fingertips, but she ignored that; it wasn't that hot, anyways. She quickly turned from him, blonde braids swinging with the movement, and glanced down at the glistening trail that led to their own personal pot of gold.

She looked over her shoulder at him and smiled heartbreakingly sweet, then dropped the match.

The path of gas quickly caught, fire eating up the fuel like a starving kid in a grocery store. She watched, so intensely, as first the walls caught, then the doorframe. Once she saw the flames heading closer to the bomb clusters in and outside the building, she knew it was time to go. "C'mon," she said in a satisfied sigh, and almost dreamy look on her face. "Let's get going 'fore it blows."

[albedineity]

For a while there, everything seemed fine.

The building went up in flames as fast as Heine was expecting it to, and it wasn't long before he was turning with Rikku's words, letting her run before him so that he could keep an eye on her, make sure she wasn't too far behind, too close to the explosion. They couldn't have been more than two hundred yards away when the flames finally licked at the lines and curves of the bombs, setting them off mere in seconds later, and the force of the explosion pushed at their backs, rolling waves of heat over the top of Heine's heads until it was nearly suffocating him in a blanket of thick and unending warmth. He didn't pause, though, didn't stop until they were turning onto the streets of the city, until their shoes were scuffling over the gravel and rock of an abandoned alley, and then--

Well, then something hit him like a slap in the face, and he almost barreled over, almost toppled onto the ground as he slid to a stop, fingers grasping at the material of Rikku's sleeve as he stopped her along with him. Something in the air. Something toxic, poisonous, deadly, and wrong, and something was off, something wasn't goddamn right, and it made every hair on his body stand on edge. Almost like Giovanni, kind of, maybe, except this was different, this was stronger, and it was enough to have his teeth clenching, his jaw tightening as red eyes drifted up over brick walls, up over every spare inch of building around him.

"Rikku," he breathed, and his eyes weren't on her, were still inspecting their surroundings as he held still, as his muscles lay coiled and tense beneath his flesh. "Do you feel that?"

[kleptoness]

Expecting the wave of heat didn't fully prepare her for it, and she felt the ends of her hair curl, could feel her skin tighten as her pores closed to block the heat from sucking up all the moisture in her body. But heat was something she was used to, could deal with, and all she could do was grin so widely because they had done it and it was so beautiful. The blonde girl took a chance, made a risk, jumped in mid-air and spun to face him for half a second, winking before she faced forward again, half-stumbled but caught herself and continued running.

Always the show off. Needing to stroke her own ego simply because she could.

At the same time it hit Heine, the force or whatever it is slammed into Rikku, knocking her breath away and just plain shocking her. She was jerked back by Heine's grasp, almost falling into him but twirling to the side just in time and catching her foot on something, felt her ankle twist, bit her lip and managed to stay standing on one foot. She leaned down, rubbing her ankle and letting her eyes drift around; she'd be okay, but it would hurt for a few hours.

"What... is it?" Her voice had fallen to a whisper, something that hardly ever happened. She straightened, putting weight on her semi-injured foot and was half-thankful to find out she could probably walk, hopefully run, on it. She reached out, curling her fingers into the back of his t-shirt and giving it a gentle tug. "Never mind. Let's just go, yea?" But emerald eyes were still fixated on the ball of flame that had once been the library, even as she took half a step back because she could feel, she could feel the thing that had floored both of them coming closer and closer and-

"Really, let's go. Now."

[absolute_npc]

t hadn't been there a moment before. The time it took from there being nothing to something, however, was the blink of an eye. Almost quite literally, even. The figure that stood in their path now was perhaps the conclusion of what every so often they may have seen out of the corner of their eye or in a flashing moment of hallucination. They all looked the same: empty ghostly suits of armor, dragging their unseen weight silently. They moved as if on guard, always ignoring the refugees like they weren't even there, and were gone as fast as they appeared.

Except for this one.

There was no hurried sense of movement, but it would stop when it was within speaking distance, and it obviously was there to see them. If the two of them did not stay put themselves respectively, there would be a point where when they stepped, the air pressure would shift even further, smashing like a weight of bricks to hinder their movements. It was logical to think these beings had no meaning, no face, and no real purpose. But the way the creature tilted its head, looking up towards the flicker of flames and heavy smoke rising from the duo's latest target, did not coincide with that logic. If it had a mind of its own, and held any attachment to this city as its own, it might have been angry.

But, instead it looked back to Rikku and Heine and moved forward a step more. And that was all the remaining distance it needed to cover to change its shape. The process initiated like an illusion, the generic shape one moment being just that and then it had slimmed out as if it had always been that way. The armor remained, and so did the bandages encasing its head. "What-" It started to speak, an emotionless but very familiar sounding voice as it lifted a hand to rip the bandages away to reveal its face.

A mirror image of Heine; it would start with the one who looked like the leader. "-are you doing?" it asked, a perfect copycat voice to echo, tilting its chin up slightly as it waited for an answer. If it knew better, it might have been looking down on them, because oh if only they knew how low they really were in this place. But that probably wasn't the case, because the native's memories were shattered, long gone and any sense of pride it ever might have really had wasn't present. And so it merely held a blank expression as it stared. It looked human, yes, it looked exactly like the man it was in front of, but it was so void of any feeling that it was hard to believe this thing was anything more than a physical mirror. Or maybe just a trick of the mind. If they knew better, they would know their best course of action would be to remain as emotionless as it did. It had been something once, but it was currently only a fragment. But this fragment could mimic and it could learn. Their collective fate was practically in their own hands. But no one was there to tell them that. "...Explain. Now."