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Talking, as it turned out, was not a free action.

The soldiers, who had just entered and slammed into Elizabeth, went into attack mode, striking out to recover their injured comrade and to contain the others.

The first thing they noticed was that the enemy was just as fast as they were, if not slightly faster - no, definitely slightly faster. The second thing was that they were outnumbered at least two or three to one. The third was that the enemies were blocking bladed weapons with bare arms and with steel weaponry.

One soldier deflected a thrust from Clarissa, tackled her, and tried to roll her over and force her into a lock. Another pair split up from either side of of Finnegan, wielding knives and dancing just out of his range. A third and fourth pushed into Elizabeth, while another pair grabbed their injured comrade, and one more went into the bedroom chasing after Helena. Upon arriving there, he attacked, throwing his entire weight forward behind his knife.

Family? Family?! Family seemed to be the magic word to turn Clarissa into a murderous batshit crazy teen. HE HAD NO RIGHT TO BRING THEM UP. NO RIGHT. Images of her parents and different family outings rushed through her mind. I miss them. Tears went down her eyes while she stood there frozen. Her mouth was slightly open as if she couldn't believe Finnegan for using the family argument against her.

These soldiers no longer looked like normal Hispanic people. They had the faces of the scientists. They were dressed in Host-Agent costumes. They had become the people that forced her into that situation.

"Hehehehe...family....'It is dismal coming home, when there is no one to welcome one!' Anne Radcliffe from The Mysteries of Udolpho." Clarissa did not sound like the shy broken girl she'd been only seconds before. Her voice was brittle and high. Her eyes were wide and she could not seem to stop crying.

She threw a shaky thrust which was easily blocked. The soldier chose to follow through with a tackle and THAT surprised her. Instead of putting her in a lock like he hoped, she swiped her claws in an upward movement. Intestines would make for a good jumprope. The man jumped away from her fast enough to avoid that sad fate (he did get a relatively light scratch across the abdomen though).

Clarissa got up fast and chose to issue a warning. "If you know English, hear this: leave or I will eat you." Her brittle voice seemed to get a little higher in pitch. "Desaparecen o te voy a comer," she translated. She licked her claws to further prove her point. Starting now. "Comienza ahora." She darted toward her chosen victim - the soldier that attempted to tackle her.

Neither soldier circling Finnegan spoke; the more he stepped, the more he realized they were cornering him. One held a knife in reverse; the other wielded what appeared to be a short mace.

The soldier allowed Clarissa to get close, then turned aside her strike, trying to put his own blade into her spine.

The other soldier reached forward toward Elizabeth, then looped his arm behind her shield.

The way a human arm interacts with a shield, even one grown as part of the arm, there is always a weak spot - a pivot point, if you will. When pressed or pulled, this point will always allow the shield to move freely.

The soldier somehow knew how to hit this point, and did so, pushing aside Elizabeth's shield before trying to thrust his own dagger into her heart.

Another triplet of soldiers arrived from outside, covering the pair who were dragging out the injured one. There certainly were plenty of these troopers.

(Quick map of the building smile

Helena had hardly started her work when the soldiers started making a fuss, not even trying to be stealthy. She heard it and had turned by the time one came charging in. By now, Helena was enraged.

She'd been dropped out of Neverland without explanation into a country with a native language she didn't comprehend. Then, when they attempted to make the best of this turn of events by trying to find some clean clothes for their clothing-challenged party member, they were shanghaied by some Mexican militant with insider information on who they were. This man had tried to play friendly, but when he proved himself unfriendly, she had not only failed to kill, but been yelled at by the only person there that wasn't a ******** freak. When she tried to fix that problem, they were interrupted by more soldiers with an apparent intent to kill, as Helena's assailant was now displaying.

"Go to Hell!" She shrieked, retaliating in two successive swings: the first blade swept aside the knife, and the second blade followed in its predecessor's path, using the closer proximity for a shot at the vulnerable throat.

Elizabeth stared at the knife. The world seemed to be passing in slow motion. She spun with the shield, catching the knife hand in her left and deflecting it upwards.

At her face.

In a split-second decision that would be questionable for any other species in the world, she opened her mouth. The edges cracked open, her whole face splitting into an ugly grin. Her teeth morphed into great, hideous, razor-sharp shark teeth.

Crunch.

The soldier stared at the hilt of his knife, all that remained as she chewed at the blade and swallowed it. As he continued his dumbfounded nonreaction, Elizabeth grabbed the rest of the knife out of his hand.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

Elizabeth, having eaten the entire knife, felt as her face returned to normal.

-3 AP

Elizabeth almost laughed. "Are you really that stupid?" She grinned widely at the man in front of her, pulled him close, and released a torrent of dissolving bile directly onto him.

Eating was no longer just eating for Elizabeth. It was sustenance, a combat method, stress relief, and a great way to make a point.

In this case, the point was that these soldiers were in over their heads.

Clarissa growled and forced her center of gravity lower than normal. This was rather easy to do since all she had to do sit in a Horse Stance that she'd read from a self-teaching karate book. She then aimed a glob of purple bile at the face of the soldier trying to attack her with the bayonet. The bile hit the man's face and caused him to lose focus on the bayonet's direction. Instead of hitting Clarissa, he hit the other soldier's arm. "'It's no fun to be yellow,'" she quoted.

Now that the soldier had collided into Clarissa, she used her teeth to tear into the man's side. His screams made the soldier holding her down let go, so she quickly turned around and clawed open his belly. "'Maybe I'm not all yellow. I don't know. I think maybe I'm just partly yellow and partly the type that doesn't give much of a damn if they lose their gloves.' J. D. Salinger from Catcher in the Rye."

(Elizabeth: +1 AP for epic combat maneuver.)

The man, apparently, was that stupid.

There was nothing he could do, since Elizabeth still had his arm. He went down, nary a sound escaping his lips.

(Clarissa: -0 AP)

It was a good strategy, and it worked at first. The man, hit in the face with disgusting acid, had actually tripped into her, dropping his weapon on the way. He was made combat ineffective by a bite.

The soldier who was holding her, however, was apparently not a greenie, and didn't even react to the scream; instead he sat down with her, beat her center of balance, and threw her over his hip. She landed on her back, with a knife about to plunge into her throat.


Finnegan, too, had a relatively good strategy, but it relied on one mistaken belief: That he could ignore, even for a few seconds, a man experienced enough to use the mace in this sort of combat.

A mace weighs about five pounds. It is little more than a ball attached to a stick; in fact, in this case, that was precisely what it was. Some maces have spikes attached. For all the good they do, they might as well be for decoration. That's not what a mace is designed to do. A mace crushes.

And suddenly, Finnegan felt his leg shatter. The man had missed his first swing, but he had somehow - Finnegan hadn't been watching, he didn't know how - brought it back around and into his left leg. The spin kick failed to materialize; he dropped to the ground, and the man brought the mace back up for a straight-down strike, intended as a finishing blow.

At least he had knocked out the other guy.


And as with everyone else, Helena, too, had a decent strategy, but it relied on two mistaken assumptions.

One, that she was faster than the opponent.

Two, that the opponent had no ranged weapon.

The opponent did have a ranged weapon, and it was his knife.

He pinched the blade between his fingers as he saw her sprinting; as she lunged, he hurled it. It moved very, very fast. It embedded itself in her shoulder.

His arm was still out, though, and so only his left arm remained to protect his stomach, and that wasn't enough. Helena knocked aside his arm with one hand, and cut him deep across the stomach with the other - no chopping in half, but still a very serious wound that probably had the man disabled.

This brought Helena into the hallway that led to the front door, from whence she could see a few important things. Firstly, that there were still a lot of soldiers outside. some of them were wielding melee weapons; others rifles. Secondly, that the truck she was staring at had a machine gun mounted on the top, and only the injured soldier beneath her was stopping the gunner from shooting.

Looked like the front door wasn't an escape option.