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Pendour was out. She'd been told that she was meant to be a protector, and she had full intentions of taking that responsibility seriously. It had also been implied that given the strength of the Negaverse and their philosophy against violence, she would fail. She was a few months in now, and so far things were going very anticlimactically. She was still alive, which was nice, but she hadn't exactly been acting as a guardian either. This was mainly because the few times she'd been out, she hadn't encountered anyone particularly dastardly. Well, except for the small, angry cat, but that was a different story.

She had a feeling that all that was about to change. It wasn't some emotional thing, either. It seemed to be an aura, floating around dark and cold in her mind in contrast to the brighter ones that she'd felt previously.

She stopped in her tracks in the middle of the sidewalk, unsure of what to do. Could she find the person if she wanted to? What would she do if she found them and they were doing something unfortunate? Well, that was going to have to be a moment by moment decision. For now, if she could only make herself a target rather than anyone else around...

She summoned her ocarina and blew into it, blasting out a fairly loud, very off key note.

Pendour stood with her feet planted in the sidewalk badly playing her ocarina. It was a bit painful for her to listen to it, as well, but it seemed to be working. The unfortunate part of all this was that the way she could tell that was because the aura, like someone silently walking up on you in a dark room when you were supposed to be alone, was getting closer to her. Her skin pricked out in goosebumps under her gloves. She shivered.

She started to hear the physical sound of footsteps. There was a flash of movement. Someone dropped down from above. Pendour's song, if you could call it that, halted in its tracks as she gave a startled gasp behind her instrument.

She gave him a quick look up and down. It was a strange sight, even by the magical standards she was starting to become accustomed to. Scholomance had been the picture of death, but this boy looked broken. The lines on his joints matched the holes in his chest and head. Pendour blinked. So this was what Chaos sickness did to people. She took a half step forwards, lowering her ocarina as her brow furrowed.

He promptly snatched it away. She didn't fight him on it, although she did wince as the ceramic shattered in his grasp. Those pieces looked like they could be sharp. She would hate it if he ended up cutting his hands.

She took a step backwards and looked up at him, wide eyed and slightly worried. "I really did have that one coming," she said. "Or, um, hello." Her newly empty hands began to twist at her bracelets.

While it was true that Pendour had been being rather loud, she wasn't sure that her poor ocarina deserved such harsh treatment. It wasn't as though she could play it anymore. It didn't need to be a pile of rubble, but there it was, right under his shoe. She thought that she could probably summon it back, but she did not want to further annoy him.

She winced harder at his accusations than at his destruction of property. "I understand," she said. She did not feel that arguing was the way to go, here. Perhaps if he could burn through his anger now he wouldn't have so much left for anyone else who came along. "I just wanted to see that you were not committing atrocities on people, as a whole. I'll rethink my strategy on checking that for the future."

But he was already calling something strange and pulling a little doll from the air. Was that his weapon? It matched him. Still, Pendour did not have a lot of time to think about all that before she was pulled forwards and found her body moving without her telling it to. She looked up, eyes wider, and asked, "What is this?" There was of course the magic of summoning weapons and going to space, but she had never seen anything like this.

She stepped to the left. She stepped to the right. She spun. She bowed. Then, just as she found herself back in control, it burst and sent her flying. She didn't go particularly far, but she did scrape her palms up in an attempt to catch herself only to land hard on her knees anyway. She looked up. "Well, that was unpleasant. Are you satisfied now?"

Pendour knew that a lot of conflict came from competition over resources. Silence was was a resource, certainly, and she could understand the reason he had reacted to her sound, which was why she’d acted as she did, but now her instrument was long shattered and she couldn’t understand why he would keep her.

Hairs on the back of her neck prickled as she kept staring him down after his magic. This wasn’t even close to anything she’d experienced before, and her instincts were screaming at her that something was off.

And that preoccupied moment was when he decided to kick her right under the ribs. It knocked the breath right out of her lungs in a half-scream, half gasp of deep pain.

She doubled over. Then, she lifted her head just enough to , her eyes deer in headlights shocked for all that her face was pulled tight from pain. That was when her flight response kicked in. She took off down the sidewalk.