Welcome to Gaia! ::

The cafeteria was dim with the lack of power, but the scene in the room was all too familiar; Jordan didn't need extra light to see Tracey, or to recognize the brittle, furious set of Rep's back and shoulders outlined against the light from the windows, or to understand the aggressive standoff stretching into a thin snarling tension. He'd come looking for something to eat and found a fight just about to happen.

It was Taym, too, he realized with weary anger. Great. He took a deep breath, set his shoulders into a confident and angry stance, and yelled, in the most commanding tone he could scrape up. "WHAT THE ******** ARE YOU DOING?"

Fionnghal was just a ring again and Taym's empty hands were back on the tabletop and they were shaking, again, but Jordan possibly remembered that Taym's hands (or Amity's, at least) shook anyway. With exaggerated calmness he plucked up a ripped-out page and held it aloft, eyes off the both of them even though taking his eyes off Rep felt like an enormous mistake.

"It wasn't unprovoked," he said calmly, gathering up the ruined remnants of what had been The Idiot and shuffling them into a pile. His voice and the deliberate movements of his hands did nothing to hide the fact that he was still taut as a violin string. Looking at him was like looking at a cornered rabbit that was going to zigzag off at any second. He wasn't going to be fooling anyone.

Rep didn't take his eyes off Taym as he gathered up the pages of the book, mentally classifying the other man as a hyena, cringing and scurrying but with a bite you wouldn't want to be cornered with. At first he'd assumed he was no threat, now he reconsidered it, he was the worst kind of threat, a violent a*****e, you were in for a fight but you could never tell what a coward was going to do next.

It was only when Jordan directly addressed him that he finally hauled his attention to him instead, the cold forged anger melting like a snowflake under a blowtorch. He couldn't even face his gaze, looking away submissively himself, his tone petulant but defeated. "He ******** had it coming."

He still didn't desummon Tracey, his grip white knuckle on his handle, loathe to show weakness in front of the other hunter. "With all due respect, he's a ******** p***k."

"So are you," Jordan said dryly, "but I don't hold that against you, generally." He kept half an eye on Taym as the skinny man left, but didn't say anything to him. He'd said plenty last time they met.

He waited until Taym was out the door to speak again, gentling his tone a little. "We're all bored out of our skulls and irritable from the ******** heat, but I'd really prefer it if you'd avoid getting cuffed over a minor altercation." He didn't say the rest of what he could have said, that with the power imbalance, Taym could easily have ended up in infirmary; Rep knew that, and reminding him would likely only make him bristle.

Jordan couldn't quite keep the stern scowl in place, and the corner of his mouth twitched up. "Also true," he said. "Seriously, though, if you're going to pick a fight, do it with someone who isn't fresh out of the pod, would you? And not indoors." He settled a hand lightly on Rep's arm, aware that a bullet had been narrowly dodged, but silently relieved that he'd walked in in time to defuse the situation before it needed explaining to anyone else.

Jordan nodded slowly. "You belong in Sun," he said, quietly and seriously. His eyes went briefly unfocused as he conferred silently with Ferros. He nodded, as though agreeing with something, and let his hand drop away with a delicate brush of fingers. "Let's go outside," he said.