Polarize (neverwinter)

So, what does a piece of government tech, advanced far, far beyond the years and ages, something you would likely never see for another century or two at least? It wanders of course, Seraph had no purpose right now, no motivation, and so she wandered. The city from above so late at night was breathtaking, the lights twinkling like numerous stars was amazing, even to her limited scope she gave an appreciative nod at the surprising beauty that hid within this city plagued by crime, like a diamond in the rough; one just had to look hard enough to find it, to suss it out from the cracks and drag it out from under the dirt, the grime and the filth.

She didn't have to go far to preform this task, merely look down into the darkness, scan the light as it glimmered off the windows, red, white and orange mingling together, a contrast against one another that made her sigh that soft harmonious sigh and then she stopped. Why, what reason was there for her to stop as she looked down into the darkness, the blue of her wings casting a faint iridescent glow across her body as she slowly began to descend to the ground, slowly like an angel descending from the heavens above. She touched down outside a shop, it was still open and she could hear shouting, demands, threats and she felt an itch at the back of her neck. She picked out three key words that...for a lack of a better term, sent a chill down her spine before a gunshot broke the silence. Married, wife, kids; a father, she looked in again and saw the man who was begging on the ground the other had shot him but he wasn't dead, he was badly wounded but he wasn't dead.

Then the other man, the gunman made a mistake, he pointed the gun down at the injured man a malicious gleam in his eye, hate and glee mixed together and she.....she snapped. There was this whistling, wailing sound that caught the man's attention it was a banshee wail, blind and furious and it was coming from her. From the woman that couldn't hurt a fly, eye's flashing red, face contorted into this....incomprehensible visage, seething, teeth clenched and then she launched herself through the window, grabbed the man; more gunshots this time fired at her; the rounds bouncing off her skull uselessly as she spun and with every bit of her strength threw him into the ground and watched, just watched as he bounced across the ground like a skipping stone, crunching, cracking squishing, as he slammed into the side of a car, buckling it in like a tin can as she walked towards the other man, the red haze fleeing her vision one hand reaching out for him.

She had to get him to the hospital, had to save his life, she had momentarily forgotten about the crook, or rather she didn't even know what she had done, that she had practically liquefied his insides with and the blood was pouring out of all the gashes, the cuts and the broken snapped limbs and there she was shuffling towards him, the injured man wanting to help him, she was at a complete loss of words. "You are..hurt."

((With Glenn's permission, this will be an autohit in order to advance some story <3))

A person who sees %#!@ like that can get quite the wrong impression. What Eddie saw was a woman with glowing eyes hurl a man like he was a sack of kittens shot through a watermelon launcher and introduce the by then already incredibly dead body to a sedan, which then flipped into the street and blocked traffic handily (instead of, say, a meta terminally interrupting a sadistic thug's fun.) At this point, Eddie saw the creature turn and start to make her way back toward the building she'd assaulted... And right about there, she saw red - this monster would not kill another!

Dropping from the building opposite, a couple control bursts on her experimental jetpack saw her dropping in Seraph's direction, the Grim Hitter raised high above her head, the skullsuit's helmet gleaming in the arc of her attack... the throttle was clenched, the weapon brought down, and then revved at the perfect moment. Seraph must have heard something, perhaps the maneuvering thrust, but she was turning and raising her forearm to shield her eyes from the sun... So that was why the blow caught her arm full on instead of her head, as Eddie had been aiming for.

Time stood still for a moment, like reality went 'oh crap!' for a moment, but that's probably just showmanship - everything seems to flow more slowly when something dreadful happens. After that moment of crystallized horror, all hell eventuated. A thunderous CRASH marked the force rocked the world around them, buckling the street beneath Seraph at least two feet and shattering windows for a block in each direction... But even with that much force involved, most of it still went into Seraph's arm... which could not take the stress. It broke, right where the forearm meets the elbow, but the force was absorbed by her bicep, which held up commendably with the harsh sound of a servo straining for all it was worth. A terrible force met the immovable core of her body - Eddie was not strong enough herself to do madcap damage to her arm, but some significant damage was down, and the hammering blow earthed itself against her side, knocking her to the ground as Eddie's feet touched down.

Eddie's ears rang, her body was shaking, and the Skullsuit was beeping at her in her helmet, registering a concussive force that set off her medical sensors (a safeguard against the event she was injured and had no way to call for help) and low power. Had that hit really taken that much energy? She was interested in a mildly concussed sort of way, checking her capacitor. Yup... 22% power. Interesting... So a more powerful hit took more power? She wasn't hurt... A bit dazed, very fizzy in the upstairs... But fine! Perhaps the gyro had taken the hit? She looked at her weapon - it was smoking! There's a thing... learn something every day, she mused.

Only then did she look down at the woman she'd struck. She was alive... And she was a machine?! She'd seen Terminator once, but... Real machines like that? She stepped back out of the small crater she'd made, watching the stunned gynoid. The being was still alive, if a machine could be said to live, but what of everyone around? She looked up for the first time. People were knocked down, glass was broken, one person had a cracked Iphone out with an amazed expression on her face with her hair blasted back, but that was about the extent of it. Sirens were already coming... That was fast... Eddie looked down at the gynoid again, then at the... Ski-masked man... With, yes, a gun... And the shop keeper who was surrounded by a man with a phone and a concussed look, a screaming woman, and a man who even as she watched ate a cheeto and nodded at her. Then back down at the gynoid.

"Oh."

The sensation of wrongness hit her almost as hard as she'd hit Seraph! "Oh... HE was a robber... and YOU were helping?" she asked, in the sheepish tones of someone who was still buzzing in shock from a hit that shook her teeth.

She was so close, just a few more feet, just a scant few steps and she could have gotten the man to a hospital when something caught her attention and she turned to look into the sky. Something caught her by the arm, jerked her into the ground like a steam trunk full of lead as her world was set spinning by the impact, her body sprawled across the pavement, eye's looking this way and that. They all spied the same thing, a crater of black maybe two feet deep; a monumental pothole that held her form. She looked up with that same unblinking expression but her mind was screaming with agony, she was hurt as those binary fragments blurred into sound, sound that she soon found was escaping her mouth.

Yes, Seraph was screaming, the blow had damaged her internals; broke the arm, snapped a few ribs along the way and put a wrench in the servos as her arm shook and twitched, attempted to move even a fraction of an inch but could not; the nanites were doing their best to kick her body into healing itself but...damage was damage and they weren't honestly designed to deal with so much damage at any one time. They could heal her, yes, but the time would measure in the months and she understood that all to well as she looked around, spying Eddie holding the smoking gun or....rather bat in this instance. "Yes, I-I believe one s-should ge-ge-generally look before they le-le-l-l-leap" There wasn't any sign of pain on her face, no emotional responses save for, maybe a look of irritation. It was all in her voice. The ache soaked each little word, each verbal stutter as she slowly got to her feet, her head slowly adjusting to gradually look down at the slightly shorter woman.

"Y-you appear to have dented the actuator servos in my arm and...broke the skeletal support structure in my chest and arm. Surprising, from my understanding, not even a one two five millimeter high explosive anti-tank shaped charge could do that. A bruise at best. Which means, that was more on the level of a German luftwafe TAURUS KEPD 350 air to ground cruise missile loaded with a five hundred kilogram Mephisto warhead." She was relatively unperturbed by the damage, it wasn't hard to push the agony back, to keep the screaming down. But deep down inside she was crying, that feeling of pain was like a bright, white sun burning a hole into the back of her mind. But Seraph was good at...keeping secrets and hiding things, and she was definitely trying her hardest to hide the immediate agony, fear and apprehension that was bubbling forward like black gooey tar.

"Now please, ta-take that man to the hospital, he has suffered a gunshot wound to the abdominal region." Her core systems were intact, but rudimentary, or supplementary systems were at the moment, offline; knocked out by that blow to the arm. She could live without them but, they were helpful in maintaining a vigil on a persons health, or allowing her unrestricted access to the world wide web and databases tied to such. She could live without that as she stared at Eddie with a look that was asking her, why did you leap before you looked, why?

Eddie stared as the machine beneath her analyzed the blow. No, machine was not the right word. Deadlock stared into those eyes, the glowing abysses in the skull helmet seeming to be holes into a distant star. There was no expression on that cold metal face, no compassion, no feeling. It was a mask - and right there, Eddie understood why a supervillain wore a mask. She grit her teeth, and shut her eyes a moment, mentally kicking herself - but only for a moment.

The leather-armored woman looked up at the cowering couple and the man eating cheetos. The man recoiled, and the couple cringed. The woman was terrified beyond the point of screaming, and the man was... Terribly pale. A part of the young heroine wanted to shout at them, to scream, to cry, to run, but instead, she shouldered the bat into its holster and moved quickly into the building. The cheeto-lord moved out of her way (but not too far), and the wife tried to object to drag her love away, to scream at her, but her husband was dying, and Eddie had exactly 0 seconds of patience.

With no ceremony, and barely a soft 'scuse me' Eddie put her palm on her forehead and shoved her backward. She let go and stumble back harmlessly, more baffled than anything else, an Eddie was already kneeling in front of the man. He wasn't scared... And she nodded. Something was pulled from inside her breast's armor, and pressed into his hand.

"This is a medical beacon. They're already on their way." She said gently, and he blinked. She tore his shirt open, bunched it up a bit, and pressed it firmly against the wound. He shuddered, and grasped it with her guidance.

Deadlock looked up at the woman, who was even now gawking at what she was seeing. "Help him press it. You need pressure to stop him bleeding out - help is already coming." She said, and after a few crystallized moments, the wife nodded and was already pressing as Eddie stood. And with that, Eddie walked briskly out, pulled Seraph up and braced her under one arm, and carried her, surprised at her weight compared to her size, first towards the man in the truck. The sirens were... Very close now.

"Look at him." She said, pointing at the twisted human wreckage of the cruel thief lodged in the car. The blood was plentiful, and he was... Still gurgling. Alive. Horribly, horribly alive.

"Watch. Your. Strength." She said, not with anger... But with a sort of hard, serious deliberateness, like she was just trying to pound a point home. "When you did that, you were like him. He was a bastard who wanted to hurt someone. So were you when you killed him. And he is going to die. Eventually." She said, and for a ghost of a moment... There was a tremble in her voice, barely perceptible. "Remember that... And never do that again." She said, and grasped her more tightly.

"Sorry I hit you. May I fix you up?" She offered.

By the time she was finished analyzing the damage, visually and by the time she picked up on the sirens the woman who had struck that blow to her was in her face, not angry; no that wasn't right, she was more stern and blunt as she pointed at the mangled corpse and all she could feel was...nothingness, a black fog as she looked back and nodded. Seraph knew how to restrain herself as she blinked at the mangled body in front of her at the bloodied broken heap of human refuse, scum as it where, and she blinked. That thing, that person had reminded her of her farther's death and then everything went black. "But I do not remember doing this..." she looked at the woman, blinked once more as a small misty halo formed in her hand; seemingly harmless at first, but containing a surprising amount of energy.

"But if I was the one who had caused this....suffering then I must end it." Ah those words she spoke seemed to put a little strain on her thought processes, she must never do harm but neither should she let someone suffer, either by proxy, or directly by her hand. She looked at the small misty halo formed above her hand as a lancet of energy, searing hot and deadly, streaked forward and punched a pin sized hole into the man's skull; ending what slow agonizing suffering he had left before he would have eventually died from the injuries she had caused him. "Then I shall end his suffering, it is the least I can do if I am to blame for his situation."

"Yes, if you have the proper qualifications to repair, fix or otherwise restore me from my damaged state." She looked at Eddie and gave a nod. Her face lacked emotion, a concept she was still...learning to get the hang of but her eyes had confusion in them, doubt, perhaps a twinge of fear thrown into the mix as she stood stiffly against the hug. The odd thing one would notice about seraph is that she was.... warm, not cold like you'd expect of a machine, but actually warm to the touch. There was even a pulse, a beat of what one could assume was a heart if they listened or felt it. "So please, can we leave now?"

Eddie opened her mouth to stop her from finishing the thief off, but %#!@ it and let this happen.she wasn't entirely sure why, she would need to consider her view on it but it seemed right. Very right. She didn't avert her gaze though - the death of this man should be seen. It wasn't right that he had been destroyed, but this was an act of mercy, however grusome. Deadlock looked to the gynoid and nodded.

"Yes, that might be a good idea." She said, seeing the cop car pull up at last. Before te man could even get out, she was tightening her grip on the surprisingly warm artificial woman and gripping the controls of her Icarus pack. With a squeeze to the control surface, the repulsor fired hard, and, straining to hold the woman, Eddie bore them aloft and up to the roof. When they were no more than four feet above it, she cut thrust and lande with the gynoid there. She glanced at her power guage on her hud - six percent power used with that alone! There had to be another way.

"Your flight - is it at least partially functional?" She inquired of the gynoid.