Welcome to Gaia! ::

The problem was that while Elaine - Joy - had never had much of a heroic streak, she did, in fact, have a basically-functional moral compass.

Her plan had been to sort of skirt by the energy signature - scoping it out, as it were, from a safe-ish distance and get ready to bolt. That had been the plan, until she had been confronted with the ugly reality of a civilian being drained - something she was by now familiar with but had not, in fact, witnessed firsthand.

She could still run. For a horrible moment she considered it. No one would ever know but her. But maybe that was the worst possible person to know.

Perhaps it was a foregone conclusion that she would try to do something. God knows that everything, nowadays, felt like a foregone conclusion.

"Hey," she yelled, trying to sound aggressive and mostly managing to sound loud. She took a step nearer, although she was still very much across the sidewalk for the moment. "What the ******** do you think you're doing?"

She did not back away, but it was a near thing. It was an even nearer thing that she did, in fact, step towards him instead. She was still unclear on how any of this worked and unsure if she should be somehow inserting herself between him and the civilian, although it looked like she'd arrived too late to be much help there.

"And you look old enough to know that your job is s**t," she observed, feeling around until her fingers closed around the whistle hanging from her shoulder - the only flimsy thing standing between her and disaster, most of the time. "Maybe consider, I don't know, cleaning toilets or something else that's actually respectable and contributes to society."

Her life had not always been iced coffee and red-bottom heels and expensive little rhinestone-studded sweaters for an extravagantly-pampered dog. She had had her fair share of gritty life experience, ranging from the exotic to the mundane. She liked to think of herself as being fairly worldly and jaded.

But in the tapestry of her experience, getting solidly punched was a new one. She tried to dodge, but it was only partly a success, and her jaw ended up catching most of the blow, which wasn't much of an improvement.

She stumbled back a couple of steps, stunned by this abrupt meeting with reality. She then discovered that between fight or flight, she was, tragically, more fight than she would have wanted to be.

"You little a*****e," she hissed, although talking already sort of hurt, and would undoubtedly hurt more later. "I need that face for making money!" She was launching back towards him, not with any particular finesse or even power, but with the sort of catlike, scrabbling clawing you might get from two women engaged in a drunk bar fight that neither would remember the next day. This would probably have been wholly ineffectual, had she not first put the whistle into her mouth and given it a blow. It would probably be wholly ineffectual anyway.

There was, unfortunately, something very satisfying in this. Maybe it was her latent white trash roots. But she did what any self-respecting woman in a drunk catfight would do, even if it might actually backfire and leave him an opening to either landing another blow or escaping.

She had no plans for what she would do after it, was the problem. She wasn't exactly attempting any sort of victory. She was simply propelled by a nasty Nashville White Girl Bachelorette Brawler instinct that said: pull out his extensions.

So she, without dignity but with a definite amount of fury, tried to grab a fistful of hair to yank on.

It occurred to her that people had actually paid her for that. Probably saying so out loud would be a bad idea. "Speak for yourself," she hissed.

It worked. Had it not been for the bullshit equalizer she probably would have been the one making tracks, and quite a while ago, and so it didn't take much for her to stagger back, trying to suck air into her lungs and looking more offended than anything.

She did not make any attempt at pursuit. She stood for a moment on the sidewalk, attempting to process what had just happened, and then turned to the unconscious civilian without a single clue of how to help them. Following instincts had worked pretty well for her so far, she reasoned.

"Yeah, run like a little b***h!" she yelled back over her shoulder, or at least tried to, although it came out in more of a broken wheeze as she bent double. The attempt caused a pang in both her jaw and her lungs, and she amended her assessment of her own performance.

Well enough, anyway.