7th of May, 2011
The only thing stopping Missy from squirming out of the Nightflyer's grip with all her might is the rather acute knowledge of the drop waiting for her if she somehow succeeds. Which is also why it took her barely a couple of seconds to fearfullysnake her arms around the villain's neck right after she took off just to be extra sure she wouldn't end up as a smear on the ground fifty feet below.
Still, her current situation 'merely' impairs her from escaping by her own means; it does not stop her from glaring at her captor while yelling imprecations at her. After all, it's not like there's a crowd to impress in her immediate surroundings anymore, so she's free to run her pottiest mouth at the other girl.
"Let me down, you birdbrain ass, or I swearI'll find a way to make your life a living hell!" she growls at her kidnapper.
"Nu-huh," the thief answers childishly, even as they make a good clip straight for Medhall, which strikes Missy as particularly odd considering how the thief's wings only occasionally flaps at her back – probably some Tinker nonsense, but she still makes note of it, "Vista has been very mean to this little Nightflyer when she tried to sneakily entrap her earlier on the boardwalk! So she's earned herself a punishment!"
Missy tenses, and almost shoots back a scathing and falsely brave retort, only for Insight's voice to ring in her ear, courtesy of her communicator.
"She's just playing around, Vista," the Thinker reassures her, even if her tone remains clipped and serious, making her feel inwardly grateful for the discreet camera recently added her visor for once, "Dauntless has been warned and rerouted toward you in any case. Just keep her talking in the meantime, I'll be with you every step of the way."
Missy discretely takes a breath, before asking:
"What kind of punishment exactly?" she drawls with her cheeks all puffed up.
"Weren't you listening?" the thief replies, her lenses glitching once again to display a couple of furrowed brows, "This little Nightflyer said that we would blow soap bubbles atop the city's tallest building together, so blowing soap bubbles we shall!"
"What?" she answers back a little flatly.
"After all, it's not like this little Nightflyer has had many opportunities to talk to a cape her age," the villain not-quite explains, "So she thought that the two of us could talk a little without the fun police raining on her parade for once!"
Contemplating the entire chain of thoughts required to come up to that point throws Missy for a loop, to the point that she only manages to find her voice back once they finally touch down atop Medhall, the villain easily letting go of her, her mask displaying once again her kinda-sorta eye-smile as she hops, skips and sits herself on the railing overlooking the city.
"Come sit!" she waves Missy closer before patting the railing next to her, before wagging a finger her way, "And no pesky attempt to entrap this little Nightflyer!"
"Humor her, Vista," Insight's voice is the one that finally pushes her to take a step forward, "Dauntless is less than two minutes away."
It doesn't take long before Missy is sat next to the thief, who directs another of her pseudo-eye smiles her way, before extending a palm upward, and, in a wash of dark unlight that makes her tense once again, pulls two cylinders out of nowhere, before handing one to her.
"That's–" the Thinker whispering in her ears sounds almost as baffled as she feels as she mutely watches the villain unscrew the top part of what most definitely is a soap bubble toy, "What the hell? How?! Are those– argh! I don't know how she did it?!"
Missy remains silent as she watches the thief softly blow through the ring-shaped part of her toy without having to pull off her mask, a stream of soap bubbles starting to fly away in the warm spring breeze.
"Come on, Vista, give it a shot!" the villain prompts her, eye-smile on full display.
A little woodenly, having the very strong impression of being in a fever dream, Missy does so, uncasping the toy before blewing a stream of bubbles of her own.
That's it? she can't help but ask herself, feeling baffled, that's her grand master plan? Capture one of the Wards to do something so–
"Childish," she hears herself say, her eyes locked on the circle-shaped part of the toy.
"That's the point," the thief answers easily in her flat voice, "Just because we are what we are, it doesn't mean we can't be children too at times."
Missy's brows furrows behind her mask as she gives the other girl a narrow look, ignoring the soap bubbles dancing in the wind around them.
"I'm a hero," she says, feeling more than a little peeved by the other girl's comment, "With more than three hundred arrests on my record."
"And this little Nightflyer is both a thief anda killer," comes the clipped answer, "But what makes her different from a child soldier is this," she blows another stream of bubbles, "Allowing herself to behave like the child she still is when she feels like it."
"What's your point, Nightflyer?" Missy asks.
When the thief's attention comes back to her, her eye-smiles are gone.
"You try too hard, and it's unhealthy," her answer hits her like a slap across the face, "It's written all over your face during each and every of your public appearances. The spotlight, the cute outfit; you don't enjoy it anymore, because you feel like you should be more, do more. But you don't. Inspiring people and making them smile is just as heroic as arresting criminals, because if there's one thing this world cruelly lacks, it's hope. This whole 'with great powers comes great responsibility' nonsense all of you goody two-shoes have is dum-dum, and this little Nightflyer thinks the only one who truly gets it in this city is Assault. Why be dour and grim-faced all the time when you can be a hero and have some fun at the same time?"
Missy watches, even as an entire gamut of emotions runs inside her mind, while the thief takes a moment to blow another stream of bubbles in the wind before speaking again.
"Anyone with a functional frontal lobe can tell that we're all hanging by a thread," she explains further, eyes lost in the distance, "Assuming nothing changes, society as we know it has five, maybe six more years to go as is, before it irremediably collapses, which we can all thank the three murder-monster for. This little Nightflyer perfectly understands why the adults are all scrambling around like headless chickens as they try to find a way to fix it, but tell me," her head snaps in Missy's direction, "What if they don't?"
The villain leans forward before Missy can find an appropriate answer to that frankly scary line of thoughts, her avian-themed, skull-shaped mask now uncomfortably close to her own face.
"What happens once everything goes down the crapper in a way nobody's able to fix it anymore?" it's only now that she notices that the thief's optics have turned into a duo of red pinpricks swallowed by near total darkness, and that her communicator has turned almost eerily quiet in the wake of her argument, "And, more importantly, what will you see when you look back? Will it be the life story of someone who did her hardest to grow up too fast, too quickly, leaving everything else behind? Or will it be the life story of someone who managed to find the time to actually enjoy her life in spite of her parahumanity?"
This time, Missy does manage to find her voice, as her own cheeks heat up in outrage.
"I haven't had a normal day since I got my powers, you bitch!" she hisses.
"Neither did this little Nightflyer," the thief answers tit-for-tat as she leans back, unfazed by her aggression, "That doesn't stop her from trying not to forget what being human and what acting her age is."
"And what? Taunting and humiliating Glory Girl in a flight race and kidnapping me is your answer?" Missy sneers.
"Miss Glory Girl made it so this little Nightflyer had to bust her own shoulder in order to escape," the thief sniffs, "And a petty revenge is about as childish as it comes, so she is perfectly entitled to it."
A pause.
"Plus, it was funny," once again, the eye-smiles make a return, now with a complimentary giggle, "Miss Glory Girl is very easy to rile up. This little Nightflyer cannot wait to see all the memes on PHO!"
Apparently satisfied, the thief blows another stream of bubbles while kicking her feet as she falls silent once again.
"Vista," the Director's voice says inside her ear, "Dauntless is now present on the scene. Insight tells me Nightflyer almost certainly knows about it though, which means our chances of capturing her are probably nonexistent. Nod if you understand."
Missy does so while distractedly blowing some bubbles of her own in a bid not to give the game away, even if she's starting to think the thief knows.
"Do you feel in immediate danger?" Missy discretely shakes her head, "Are you willing to keep the girl talking for as long as possible, so we can find a potential weakness of hers or any clue as to her real identity?" she nods once again, "Then I'm giving the mic back to Insight."
The whole time she listened to the Director's clipped words about this whole not-kidnapping turning into a not-interrogation, Missy has been thinking.
As annoying as it is, Nightflyer… made something of a point earlier. She isn't dumb, she's known for years that the world has been on the downslide, what with the adults at headquarters being less cautious about what they say in her vicinity than either her teachers or her sorry excuses of parents tends to be. And even if it pains her to admit it, being a hero has become something of a cop out for everything else and she may or may not have been letting being a child fall on the wayside along the way.
Hell, in recent months, the only 'childish' thing she did was a couple of sleepovers with her friends. Otherwise she either spent time at home in her room doing homeworks to avoid her parents, at HQ training and learning regulations to keep avoiding said parents, or losing her mind at school because she already knew perfectly well what she was going to do once she graduated high school and–
She blinks behind her visor, before poutingscowling.
The truth is, besides goofing off a little with the other Wards from time to time, all she ever does is work.
Petulantly, she blows another stream of bubbles in the air, a sour feeling settled heavily in her stomach.
"Isn't it nice?" her new personal bane chirps obnoxiously from next to her, and Missy feels herself obligated to glare at the other girl.
God, it's like having to deal with Louise on a sugar rush, she inwardly grumbles.
"This doesn't mean we're friends, or anything like that," Missy warns the thief without really knowing why she's spouting this in the first place.
"This little Nightflyer wouldn't dream of seducing a hero away from her duties like that," she answers with another infuriating glitchy eye-smile, "At best, we are now frenemies!"
Correction, she is like Louise on a sugar rush, she bemoans, with Jacky's smarts to top it all off and cut through any arguments.
Sobering a little, she takes the time to blow another stream of bubbles, a question that had been hanging in her mind for a while now rears its head.
"Do you regret it?" she hears herself asking.
"Huh?" Nightflyer snap-cocks her head her way.
"What happened with the Empire," she explains only a little awkwardly.
"Oh, that?" the thief hums, before looking away as she trails off, "Not really...."
Missy watches like a hawk as the other girl blows a stream of bubbles before speaking further.
"This little Nightflyer didn't like it, but she couldn't reasonably leave Miss Arachne to fend for herself. You should have seen her that night on the rooftop; she looked so lostas Mister Krieg was making his recruitment pitch to her," she cups her hand together without spilling the liquid soap, "Like a baby bird fallen from its nest, yes?"
Missy has to struggle very hard to stop the incongruous bit of laughter threatening to spill out of her lips, because she absolutely cannot picture said cape looking like she doesn't have her shit together, if only because she's able to completely kill her body-language at will through some quirk of her power.
"And well, it did stop this silly spat the ABB and the Empire had going on," the thief shrugs in a 'what can you do' way, "A bit of a shame that this little Nightflyer didn't have good nonlethal options against Brutes at the time, but she won't lose any sleep over the fact that she had to put down four unrepentant killers in order to save one – possibly two – lives with her intervention."
"If you kill a killer, the number of killers remains the same," Missy remarks a little pointedly back.
"Nu-huh," the other girl shakes her head, before pointing a finger upward, "As a matter of fact, the Bay now has three less killers roaming it than before! So it's statistically a net positive!"
Missy annoyingly blows another stream of bubbles, not finding a good argument to the villain's warped logic.
"This little Nightflyer's turn," said thief chirps, "She had this theory for a while but… could you use your power to short-out the ionosphere and make a very big, very scary lightning strike?"
Missy pauses.
"Vista, don't even think about it," Insight tells her, her tone full of warning and apprehension in equal measure.
"I don't think so," she answers a little idly after blowing a stream of bubbles, only now starting to enjoy this impromptu outing, as nonsensical as it is.
"Ah, is it because you need a medium?" she very carefully does not react at having her limitations exposed like so, "But what if you had access to something like a space elevator?"
Missy blinks.
"I don't know what that is?" she asks, now fully engrossed in the topic.
"A cable going very high in a straight line from the ground, like ionosphere high," she almost swears she can hear the grin in the other girl's voice as she explains it.
She takes a moment to really think about it with what she knows about her power, something in the back of her brain feeling almost excited about the possibilities hinted at.
"Maybe," she ends up saying through pursed lips, to a heartfelt groan of Insight in her ear, "I'd have to read up on the physics of it, but I don't see why it wouldn't work?"
"Awesome," the thief kicks her feet in barely repressed excitement, wrenching a grin out of Missy herself, "You'd absolutely have to try something like that on the meanie murder-monsters someday!"
Despite herself, Missy's own grin widens.
Thirty-ish minutes later, when the thief finally leaves – with an enthusiastic 'bu-bye, Frenemy Vista!' – having somehowmanaged to dodge around every question Insight tried to weave in the conversation, Missy's shoulders feel a little lighter for some reason, and she has a gifted soap bubble toy to remember the day by.