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As young women walking home alone in the dark went, Tate was very responsible. She had on a light-colored jacket, was not listening to her iPod, and had her phone in an easily accessible pocket. Her route home took her through safe, well-lit areas. Before, she'd wandered through any number of alleyways, but after that... um...

Interesting?

encounter with a <******** giant millipede... she'd decided to keep as much to well-trafficked areas as she could. Discretion being the greater part of valor, and all. There was still the matter of the only way to make it to her home without actually having to, um, walk an extra two blocks. The only way to make it home--the infamous Alleyway of the Millipede.

She turned the corner, scowling with distaste. Where were convenient boyfriends to walk you home when you needed them? The alleyway was close, full of more trash than last time. She couldn't wait until she'd moved to East Heights--the subway ran out that way, after all. Much safer than having to skulk through an alleyway once populated by a giant monster...

Someone had been following her most of the way home from work; she only glanced over her shoulder when the footsteps also turned into the alleyway. Huh--he looked just about as scared as she was. Was this alleyway often full of millipedes?

Either way, she was going to stop walking and wait for him to pass her. Tate did not like having anyone standing behind her, ever--walking behind her in a dark alleyway was even worse.

She smiled uncertainly at him, held tightly to the strap of her bag just in case. You never knew what kind of person you'd encounter in this neighborhood anymore...

"Oh, me neither," she said, brushing her ponytail over her shoulder. He looked pitiful, like a kid who'd been shoved into a locker one too many times. That had never happened to her; she was too damn tall. "You could be my own mother and I wouldn't want you walking behind me."

Well, that wasn't saying much--if Mariska was within a ten-block radius of Tate it was too close, really.

"We could always fight to the death for it," she suggested. She was joking, or she hoped she was, anyway. Tate knew she didn't exactly have the right equipment to fight a dust bunny to death, let alone another human being.

She did feel sorry for the guy, but she didn't really like her chances at a coin flip. Her luck had just not been that good. "Hey, no," she said, seeing a pellet of something in his hand. The 'something is wrong' alarms in her head were going off loudly--shy kids who got shoved into trash bins and lockers did not carry around smoke pellets. They didn't carry around any kind of pellets. They carried pens.

With a muttered curse, she moved to maybe shove him back away from the fallen thing and run, but either he was too fast or she wasn't fast enough. Tate tumbled over backwards, the trash bins clattering loudly as she hit the asphalt.

It was late. There was absolutely no good reason in the world why Grayson was out, except he'd decided to take a long walk earlier in the day, and it had ended up rather more extended than he'd intended. He'd made it to the park, casually wandered about and let his mind roam over the things that were bothering him, and he'd actually not been entirely depressed. That was a good thing. Spending more time with Elke was clearly a good thing; he was able to look on the bright side a little more, as he had before.

Of course, stopping for a sandwich and then falling asleep at the table hadn't been the best course of action. He had the dubious talent of being able to fall asleep just about anywhere, and apparently, cold tabletops counted. At least he'd finished his sandwich before he dozed off.

This did mean, however, that he was walking home in the dark. He wasn't patrolling, which was good, because technically he wasn't supposed to be patrolling alone -- that had been made abundantly clear at the meeting of the Zodiacs -- but he still kept his guard up. Who knew when a youma or a Negaverse agent would pop out of the shadows and pick a fight? It seemed like things were getting worse lately, what with all the hospitalizations, Chronos' crystal being stolen...

He sighed, and rounded the corner. He wasn't patrolling, but his hands were deep in the pockets of his jeans, and one was curled around his henshin pen just in case. It was kind of a tight fit in skinny jeans, but what was he supposed to do? They were the only kind of jeans he owned.

He almost walked right past the face of the alley, but he was staring at the tips of his sneakers, and he noticed smoke curling around them. That was strange, wasn't it? He made it a few more steps before he heard something crash, like trash cans, or bins, maybe. That was definitely weird.

It could have been a cat. It could have been a dog, for all he knew. But he couldn't just keep walking and pretend like it was either of those things when he didn't know.

He pulled out his pen, murmured his henshin, and light speared the darkness of the street. Hopefully he didn't need to be Leo just then -- hopefully he'd walk in and it would be just an animal -- but he had to know.

So, he turned the corner, and through a thinning veil of smoke, he saw a figure. So there was someone. It was a strain, but he could barely make out someone else, on the ground.

Definitely not a friendly situation.

His outfit caught the moonlight, and there was a faint glow around him that never seemed to disappear -- radiance, truly -- but he didn't have a chance to talk the situation down.

He watched the first figure bend, hand groping forward, and the alley was filled with an earsplitting scream. It rebounded off the walls, made his heart skip as he dashed forward, one gloved hand snatching the dark fabric of his cloak, jerking the man backward. It was like the time with Uranophane, where she'd stuck her slim hands in the man's chest, and she'd pulled out his starseed, and --

And he would not let that happen again.

Spinning the Negaverser around, Leo drew back his arm, swinging his fist at the other's face with as much force as he could put behind it. This was no game of logic, no time for talking and negotiating; he had had his hand in her chest, and there would be nothing but getting them as far away from one another as he could so that he could make certain she was all right.

He was not going to let anyone else die.

In the confusion of smoke and falling over a trash can, Tate missed Zinkenite's approach. She was too busy cursing and clutching the back of her head where she'd hit the wall to notice, and then she was in too much pain and--

Hand. In her chest.

How Tate even had the presence of mind to notice the extremely odd and certainly rare occurrence of a hand suddenly appearing submerged in her chest, no one would ever know. Her entire world was pain, to the exclusion of all else. She hadn't even known she could scream like that--

Something intervened, and the hand vanished, and the pain stopped. Tate was quite content to stay in place, one hand coming up to press against the place in her chest where the hand had vanished up to the wrist. Then she sat up (she was shaking too hard to stand) just in time to see the short guy pull a slingshot. Not exactly a super-deadly weapon, but still. Principles?

What the <********> was going on?

Zinkenite shouted in pain, throwing up an arm before his eyes but not in time to keep from being well and truly dazzled by the flash.
He pushed himself back across the ground more than slightly afraid of further retribution from the senshi, finding by some miracle he had not dropped the sling shot he fumbled in his pocket for what remained of his smoke pellets. one or two fell out under foot, but one he managed to fit to the slingshot and haphazardly fired it towards the last place he'd seen the gaudy golden uniform before the blinding flash, because all he seemed to be able to see were the spots before his eyes.