savetheearth | [open] You always wanted a visit, right?

He doesn't catch, instead dodging sideways and using the sword to bat the gold away and let it sail into the next stair's gravitational pull.

And then move towards her as quickly as he can. If possible, he must get himself between Nat and this ...other person. Her eyes are wrong, and though that isn't on the forefront of his mind it sticks. Not human.

"That can't be good for the edge," she says, and jumps straight up into the air. A crumbling stair is close enough that she rotates and lands, comparatively almost upside down, looking up with interest and taking a bottle off her belt. "Think I can get you in the head from here?"

If he follows, she's ready.

He won't follow, loathe to be in the air without a chance to change his course when she clearly has a good number of flying objects with her, and also loathe to leave the real Nat's proximity in case that the other Nat circles back to her and finishes what she started.

"Or perhaps it is simply worked by a smith more skilled and from material superior to what you know, if you use gold for weapons." It's way too soft, even he knows that. And he just has the strong feeling that the sword is good, his body tells him that it is quite excellent (when did he learn how to handle swords?

She laughs, a careless, delighted sound.

"Oh, burn. Coincidentally, that's a great opening." Yes, there's something stuffed into the opening of the bottle, and she has a lighter. Breaking eye contact she looks at her wick as she gets it to light. "You're the best."

Fire.

And he can't move the real Nat (he will have to, eventually, but he still wants to check her injuries before doing that to at least slightly accommodate for if there is something critical among her injuries).

So he does the only thing that he can think of - use the moment of the false Nat having taken her eyes off them and does jump after all, aiming for a slightly higher up part of the same flight of stairs that the wrong Nat is on, hoping against hope that he'll have the time to throw himself at her from above before she decides at whom to throw the incendiary composition.

On the ground Nat is stirring, her head pounding madly as she tries to sit up and focus. A cut on her head is bleeding into her eyes, and the danger-sense is singing high and rising. Too late she says "Don't-"

Her twin raises her head and rolls her eyes back in their sockets, eyelids trembling. Something invisible forms around her - invisible but not unfelt. She puts her free hand out in a stop gesture. Air rushes before the outside of an impermeable curved bubble as it expands around her, fast and hard, and strikes Fe like a truck. Outcroppings of rock, the 'railings' of the stair which were in the way, crumple and break loose in a great circle around her.

"You really need to stop underestimating me. I may not be a genius, but that doesn't mean I'm not smart, or I can't be important." Nat's twin is still smiling, now with an undisguised manic edge. Her skin takes on a gray tinge as she maintains the shield.

On the ground and reeling Nat stretches out a hand. She has to - she has to - The breath hisses between her teeth as the world falls away again. Something is different when it comes back.

Her twin staggers, the shield evaporating. "Oh. Oh, really? Oh, man. I am blessed." She puts her hand to her head, some of her hair falling from its ponytail, and puts the burning cocktail down. "I am blessed," she says again, and raises her hands before her, bringing them together as if seizing Fe by the throat from a distance, and lifting him.

All he can do is to not lose the sword (he can't lose the sword, not only because it is a weapon but because he has the distinctive feeling that, should he lose it, he will never be able to regain it in full) when he suddenly hits a wall, and curls up into a ball reflexively as he is repelled.

He sees how the false Nat puts her cocktail down, and when he feels the invisible fingers wrap around his neck all that he can think is well, at least that worked and then he makes a decision and throws his sword at her. It is fairly accurate and well done, and will definitely hit her if it reaches.

It's a spur of the moment thing, and he does it almost exactly at the same moment as he thinks of it. Because he doesn't want to lose the sword, but more than that he wants to live and he won't be able to continue doing that if she strangles him (and you lose the ability to do anything with strength quickly when running out of air...) and there is the chance that Nat isn't capable of doing both this ghost fingers and the ghost shield thing at the same time yet.

Edited 2015-04-22 18:14 (UTC)

She sensed it but was not quite fast enough to dodge entirely - the sword's point rips through her side, cutting her belt. His feet touch the ground as her concentration wavers. She's bleeding badly enough that her clothes around the wound darken almost instantly.

"That's not enough," she says in a snarl, redoubling her grip. Her expression now is not so much a smile as bared teeth below pale eyes patched with orange and gold, the brightest color on her. "Did you know? That doesn't even matter because you're feeding me. There's a power in pain and hatred like you could never understand."

Ignored, Nat knows she has to do something, she has to get past the fear and the pain, the reeling dizziness, the feeling of cold dread that her twin gives her. She can feel something else - something warmer - there is a tingle down her spine that makes all the rest of this seem unimportant. Help me, she asks, and shivers as she thinks she feels something assent.

Something electric runs through her body and it's part of something older than the sun and bigger than the sky, alive, and aware of her She imagines herself adrift in a dark ocean and seeing a leviathan glide below her, watching her, bearing her up. Honestly it's scary but at the same time joyful and reassuring and right, the most right thing she's ever felt.

Her twin left a her softball bat here, blood-tinged gold plates hammered around the end. Gravity keeps it where it is. Gravity is such a weak force. She can stretch out invisibly and ask, and catch it, and hurl it. And she does.

The bat whirls up end over end towards her twin, who looks up just in time to open her mouth before it strikes her. She collapses, her grip evaporating, struggling enough that her burning bottle is tipped over. The flames start to catch the gasoline that was inside.

Feivel can do many things, but there's also a good number of things that he's absolute shit at. One of them is reining his emotions in. ...He'll not even try, because while he doesn't feel hatred exactly, the blinding fury and stinking fear is pretty strong in this one right now. He is furious at this girl for hurting his sister this badly and is scared of death, and he wouldn't even know how he's supposed to weaken either of these.

Especially when they become the only things that he can hold onto properly when his consciouseness begins to fade -

But then he's suddenly released.

Gasping for breath, his fëa flickers for a moment before returning, shining even more brightly than before, and he staggers back onto his feet from where he dropped onto his knees for lack of air and consciousness and looks over at the false Nat, his eyes trying to see her and find the sword at the same time - but then he notices that she is out.

Really our, a longer, more thorough look out of clearer eyes reassures him. And there is fire springing up right next to her, but may it consume her (and he might have uttered that part out aloud between pants). There are more important things to do and he turns around to find Nat, see how she is, if the doppel did anything to her while he wasn't fully there.

The sword's path had changed after cutting Nat's twin, and with how gravity works here it had spun out and is now floating between Feivel's staircase and the one Nat is on, revolving unevenly around a big chunk of rock dislodged by the shield. It keeps looking like it will fall up or down at any moment.

Nat's propped herself in a sitting position and is wiping the blood out of her eyes. Some of the scars on her scalp have opened. They bleed freely, like head wounds always do. She feels better, if still rather shy of prime.

He throws a quick glance at it, figures that he couldn't reach it anyway and will just have to stay attentive, and kneels down next to the real Nat.

"Nat?" He really hopes that she'll answer because he has no idea what he should do here. How do you deal with bleeding sisters? ...In stories, people tear their shirt in stripes, but he doubts that he can make ones long enough to wrap them around her head, or that it would stop the bleeding.

"Present," she says, not as strongly as she'd like to. She's still dazed. A scar runs in a perfect line from just above her forehead along to the back of her neck. Other, perpendicular lines cross it, showing just barely at her temples. It's very surgical.

"Man, my head hurts... Nice work there."

"She'll likely burn soon." Literally. And he is still furious at this other to the point where he doesn't care nearly as much as he should. She tried to kill his sister (even though she kind of is that too).

"Can you get up?" He can see that the scars are well, scars that just opened up a bit, but they are still bleeding and she still did get a massive blow to the head for all he knows, and getting her to a doctor seems like a necessary thing to do. For what there is and for what there might be unseen.

It's just that, while he can support her, he cannot carry her.

The memory of that long day with the clones feels, when she's headachy and poorly focused, like something that had happened to her. And it hadn't bothered her when a clone, crying and terrified and completely non-hostile, had been descended on by a mob of clones of her and her brother. "There's more where she came from. Dozens... they have fifteen vats set up for me."

You too, she almost says, but... no, that wasn't Fe. Nat reaches a hand up in a clear request to be helped up. Then, as her danger sense spikes, she shoves at him and pushes or pulls herself, helped by the vast and patient new feeling. It's enough that the bloodied sword that hits point-first only hits the ground.

Up where Nat's doppleganger had fallen the fire is consuming a pool of gasoline violently enough that it's hard to tell if anyone is there - but the hammered-gold softball bat is gone. Nat can't feel danger or that dread-feeling anymore. She closes her eyes, suddenly wanting nothing more than to go to sleep. "Damn it, we're going to have to keep an eye out for her, aren't we..."

"But for now she's gone?" He figures that Nat will be able to tell, and the danger level right at this moment is more important than what might be in the future. They'll have to be careful.

He'll shove his shoulder under Nat's arm and pull her arm over his back, wrapping an arm around her waist in hopes that that will be enough to support her to wherever they're going now. And hoping that she won't fall asleep on him. "What is behind that door?" The one that Nat was painting on before being attacked. If it is Locke, there will be a doctor who can help them...

"Yeah. I can't heal yet, so she can't, so... she'll go lick her wounds. She's stronger than me. I gotta be more careful." A lot of other things came in with the memory, or fit in with the massive brick of information she got some time ago.

Nat lets herself be helped. She's taller than he is and probably a little broader too. Something about that seems off, but there are so many other things to try and focus on she can't.

"That's a thing with the Dark Side. That's a thing with her, that's the difference," she says, blinking hard and trying not to smile. The feeling is still around, in the background, and she knows what the red crystal means now. "Ummmm. That's in Locke, near one of the snake pieces."

"Good." He pushes the door open with the hand that isn't supporting Nat and steps through, closing it again once they are both on the other side. "...So she's on the Dark side, and you're on the Light side, and the Dark side can use them same abilities in a way that is more powerful than the Light side's way of using them?" Going by what she said. It sounds... very cliché and very ridiculous, but then if being attacked by an evil twin sister with a golden baseball bat isn't both of those, then he doesn't know what would be, so it's not actually that far off.

He'll also flip open his phone and search through the network until he finds Aaron's number, and then punch out a quick text message.

"You'd prefer I said Bogan and Ashla, wouldn't you." Once they've stopped moving Nat can stand on her own, more or less. She leans heavily against the big chunk of stone that used to be part of a monster, closing her eyes against the spinning. "It's a power connected to, to discipline, and emotion. Start feeding it fear and anger, that happens. You get stronger and paranoid and turn on everyone and start looking weird. It's like a fuel that burns hotter and it's easy to get but it sets fire to everything inside."

She feels like that's an image someone else gave her. Can't pursue that now. Nat tips her face up to the light. "But that was a gift, too. I know so much now."

"Translating concepts usually alters the meaning of what is said." Said with a nod, because that is exactly it. Bogan and Ashla? Not a language that he knows, likely not even one that he can know...

He didn't expect another echo, but it comes anyway and he blinks in surprise but then simply nods. "It seems like turning Evil or Dark or whatever you call it tends to make you ugly in all universes." There is a tinge of schadenfreude in his words, but when he continues it is gone. "If it sets fire to everything inside, will she die form that?"

"Those were the names of Tython's moons. Literally the darker moon and the lighter one. There's not a lot of meaning to miss with a literal translation. What I don't know is how the Breath got to be called the Way and then the Force." She puts her hand in her pocket and feels the bittersweet sense the red crystal makes. "It doesn't really matter what it's called, though. It is."

"I think it's more complicated than that." Nat cracks an eye open. "Nope. It's just altered her personality."

Keep her talking enters his mind, a memory of some book or movie or another. People that are injured, especially with head injuries, keep them awake so they don't lose consciousness and stay that way.

"How does it alter the personality?"

He's not normally one to keep people talking past the exchange of the information that he wanted from them, so this is a bit of a task, but he will do his best even if he's awkward.

She can tell it's a question he's asking for the sake of asking it, not something he's in search of, and Nat closes the eye again, and stretches out with her senses in a way she hadn't before.

"I think I can feel the Force. It's like... I can hear everything's voice, its heartbeat." She gestures. "I can't, but... metaphors."

"Even stones and plants?" That just sounds really weird.

And then Aaron answers and Feivel breathes a bit more easily. The doctor is coming.

"They're alive, or they... they exist, anyway. That's close enough." Reaching into her pocket Nat pulls out the necklace with the red crystal pendant. In this light its glow is hard to see. "I know what this is now. And what I've got to do with it."

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two hours later