“A change of clothes would be good,” Metanoia says. “Where is your bag, anyways?”

“Uhhh… My human form... I wasn’t sure what I would run into today so I brought a change of clothes in my bag which is on my back…” She says awkwardly hoping that it made any degree of sense.

Metanoia tilts her head slightly, looking at Abaddon with a presumably confused expression underneath her helmet. “Right,” she says. “Um, would you like to get down to the alley or something so we can change in privacy? I’m not sure how you feel about unmasking to another cape, but I don’t have anything on right now underneath this armour, so…”

“We might be able to use the two halves of the car? If they are intact enough?” She offers a little uncertain of other options.

Metanoia looks at her doubtfully, not that Abaddon could see it. “Are...are you going to drag it into the alleyway?” Meanwhile, steam begins rising from her armour as her flesh begins breaking the bone down, the ivory plates thinning with every second.

“No I will just go into the alley or you can and change here or there?”

“Sure, let’s just both head down,” Metanoia says agreeably. “We’ll change in there, and you can just...turn around or something while I do so.”

“Sounds good,” she says before jumping off the edge of the building and stopping herself inches above the damaged ground below.

Metanoia follows her, pausing briefly at the edge of the roof before jumping as well. The armour, though thinned, is still heavy, and Metanoia hits the ground with an ugly-sounding crack. She pauses again, as though contemplating life, then straightens stiffly.

“I meant to do that,” she says quietly.

Abaddon stands there watching the cape, sighing internally as regardless of the armour, that would have hurt like a bitch. Not long after the other cape recovers, there is a bright flash of light momentarily from Abaddon, followed by it all collapses into the angelic cape. When the implosion clears up, a wave comes out of her, clearing up the uneasy/fearful feeling one would get from having been around Abaddon. A woman stands where Abaddon stood, with long white hair, small petite features and a skinny figure. She’s wearing black jeans and corset, with black elbow length gloves and a white scarf, wrapped neatly around her neck and a small backpack on her back over the costume.

“I would be the great Abaddon in a more… human form,” she says taking the bag off of her back and digging through it, taking out the spare change of clothes.

Metanoia nods, taking the clothes from her. She thinks for a second, then the last of the helmet around her head bubbles and dissolves into steam, revealing a regal face with delicate features and a big grin.

“We look incredibly alike,” Zinerva points out, a chuckle spilling from her lips. “It’s quite a coincidence, actually.”

She motions toward herself to indicate her long silver hair, her pale blue eyes, and her ivory skin. Upon closer inspection, however, the minutiae of Zinerva’s features seem slightly unsettling, her skin too pale and teeth too sharp and her movements sinuous and flowing, as though her musculature were only something playing at being human.

“Scarily alike…,” she agrees slightly weirded out.

“I’m a few inches shorter, though,” Zinerva points out, now that her armour isn’t giving her some extra height.

“Good point,” she agrees before offering a proper hand. “It’s nice to meet you twin, I am Claire.” She says hoping this would be a sign of trust and mutual truce between the two capes.

Zinerva takes her hand and shakes it. “I’m Zinerva, it’s nice to meet you too.” She looks at the clothes in her other hand, then looks around the alley. “If you don’t mind, do you think you could keep watch for a second while I change?”

Claire nods, taking back her hand before the handshake become uncomfortably long, before turning to walk to the entrance of the alley. “Yeah sure, give me a shout when you’re done.”

As soon as Claire turns around, Zinerva dissolves the rest of her armour and enhancements, leaving only her lean and wiry base musculature, and quickly slips into the jeans and the top. She grabs her boots and sunglasses from where she left them before climbing the building, slipping the sunglasses into her pocket, then gathers her keys, phone, and wallet that she had scattered about in her haste to grow her armor. “Done,” she says, walking forward to join Claire. “Is there anywhere you wanted to go? I grabbed some food earlier, but then the fight happened.”

“I didn’t have anywhere in mind, I was just hoping we could walk down the main street and find something while we get to know each other?” She offers a little nervous.

“Sure,” Zinerva says. “You’re the first cape I’ve met so far, actually, so I don’t know how these things go.”

“If it makes you feel any better, you would also be the first cape I have had a… positive interaction with so far so we are both new to this I guess.” She says with a soft chuckle.

“If you’re talking about the other two villains we encountered, then it’s the same for me, I suppose,” Zinerva says, smiling as they step out onto the streets. “So where are you from? I moved here for college...and to get away from my parents.”

Claire stammers awkwardly for a moment as she tries to think of a response that doesn’t make her sound like some crazy person. “I-I was raised in a small secluded town, far from here, I guess I kinda just travelled here…” She pauses for a moment trying to avoid the subject of her dead parents. “I travelled here to see new sights and see more of the ‘great’ country we live in.” She answers finally, stressing the great with a sarcastic undertone.

Zinerva raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“My parents and I didn’t get along very well, so I ran away and here I am, making my way as a cape without much support.” The conversation takes a darker, more real turn and Claire locks up a little not wanting to get too much more into this.

“I think I can sympathize,” Zinerva says, nodding thoughtfully. “I didn’t get along with my parents either—they were too controlling, wanted me to inherit the family business and all the baggage that came with that. I’ve...kind of broken off contact with them, for now.” She swallows, looking away. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring the mood down.”

“It’s ok, sorry, just a lot of darkness behind these masks I guess.” There's an awkward pause in the conversation for a little as they walk idly down the street.

“So!” Zinerva says abruptly, clapping her hands. “Do you know any good breakfast places around...here…” She trails off as they pass by an intersection.

As they stop to check for oncoming traffic, Claire notices a burning pile of cars a few blocks away down the street running across the intersection. She nudges Zinerva gently, pointing down the side street at the burning pile of cars.

Zinerva nods, only just now noticing the lack of people and traffic around. The only bystanders are a few people with phones pointed toward the wreck, and even those people are beginning to turn around and jog away.

“Should we go take a look?” Zinerva whispers to Claire.

“Breakfast will have to wait,” Claire says in an excited tone, happy to have her day be more exciting and to be able to spend more time with the other cape.

Zinerva just nods, her body tensing as she finally begins to smell the smoke and burning rubber in the air. The shops nearest to them, she notices, are nearly completely empty, the last remaining employees making their way out onto the streets. “I think I’m going to find a place to change so I don’t ruin these clothes,” she says, pointing at the nearby coffee shop. “You mind coming with me and putting the clothes in your bag?”

“Sure…” She says, her attention mostly on the burning pile and the area around them, checking down side streets for any suspicious characters or people looking out of place. “Will growing or making the armour take long?”

“Not at all,” Zinerva says, pushing aside the glass front doors and making her way inside. “I’ll make a thin layer and build it up as we move toward the burning wrecks.”

She steps into the bathroom in the back and comes out after half a minute, jeans and top in one gauntleted hand and her body and head fully covered in ivory armour. She hands the clothing along with her belongings back to Claire, who stuffs them into her bag.

Claire smirks at the thin layer of armour “Nice figure,” she says in a light teasing manner before throwing her bag back on her back and walking out of the bathroom.

“Um, thanks,” Metanoia says, sounding surprised but pleased. “I worked hard on it.”

“I noticed,” she adds playfully, before leading the way out of the store.

As they walk toward the burning pile of cars, Claire can hear the sound of glass breaking and people shouting coming from the general direction of the cars. As they get closer it becomes evident that the shops around the area have all been broken into, or at least the few they can see from a block away, and or vandalised.

By this point, Metanoia’s armour has grown thick enough to take at least a few low-calibre bullets, and multiple spears and a shield are clasped onto her armour.

“Give me a sec,” Claire says with a hint of hesitation in her voice as a flash of light explodes out of her, a wave of fear passes over Metanoia as the light fades and Abaddon is left floating where Claire was, with the bullet marks still apparent on her.

Metanoia shudders, her head turning instinctively to look at Abaddon. She slams a spear into the ground for support to keep herself steady, then straightens back up after the wave passes, giving Abaddon a nod.

“My apologies for the master effect, if you stick around long enough you’ll get used to it.” She says, internally hoping Zinerva would stick around afterwards. “Lead the way.”

Metanoia steps ahead of Abaddon, keeping an eye out for any signs of activity. Before she even catches sight of a single person, shots ring out from behind a storefront and bullets begin flying past her.

“There,” Metanoia says, raising her shield and crouching slightly. A bullet ricochets off her armour, breaking off a chip of bone that is immediately replaced. “Up to our right, in the clothing store.”

Two bullets bounce off of Abaddon's body, ricocheting off of her body and into the walls of the alleyway. “I’ve got this one,” she says floating in front of Metanoia, contorting her hands as she takes control of two clothing racks inside the store, tossing them at 40mph in the direction from which the bullets were fired.

Metanoia begins jogging toward the storefront after Abaddon throws the clothing racks. The gunfire stops momentarily—then the looters begin shouting.

“Cape!” someone yells from the clothing store ahead of Metanoia. As she gets closer, she sees a man dragging an unconscious individual away from the storefront, his gun left discarded by his side. Looters, or perhaps gang members, begin swarming out from the ransacked stores, taking shots that mostly bounce off of her armour. Metanoia turns in place, confused, before deciding to simply continue into the clothing store to disarm the other attacker.

As all the shouting and shooting starts, Abaddon floats up out of reach of any of the attacker, contorting her hands in a violent and painful manner as she picks up two of the burning cars and makes them float next to her.

“OI,” She bellows to the people below, “if you value your lives at all, you will drop what you’ve stolen and leave.” She continues, as she throws one of the burning cars down the main street, letting it bounce past the majority of the looters, as a warning shot. She quickly contorts her hand again, bringing another car up to her side, to replace the one she threw. No more than ten to fifteen people flee down the side streets, none of which dropped the things they stole.

The armoured cape smashes through the storefront, shield raised as the looter wildly fires toward her. The shots barely chip at the bone shield, now, and in half a second Metanoia has closed the gap and slammed her shield into the gunman, sending him flying into a wall. As the man slumps to the floor, Metanoia steps toward him, feeling another bullet thud into her back. She ignores it as she picks the gun up from the ground, wondering how best to disable it, before simply removing the magazine and shoving thin shards of bone down the barrel and hand grip.

“Stay down,” she says, before pivoting to face four new attackers cautiously climbing through the storefront.

A small crowd of twenty gathers below where Abaddon float, flailing about, trying to reach her with an assortment of melee weapons. Abaddon had expected this and knew to stay a good foot out of reach from them. Her attention is focused on her ally, with a crowd of looters gathering in front of her. She drops the two cars between the group that has swarmed below Abaddon and Metanoia, before contorting her hands, to pick up two shards of glass at a time, from the broken storefronts, and throwing them at the legs of the crowds of people in front of Metanoia. A few volleys of glass are thrown at the legs of the people at the back of the gathering, leaving lacerations and wounds on their legs, leaving them unable to advance forward upon Metanoia.

Metanoia grabs a spear from her back as she watches the bandana-clad looters approach, the spear quickly blunting and thickening into more of a staff-shaped form that she often used on herself for durability testing. She isn’t an expert in using a staff by any means, but between the fact that the weapon is literally an extension of herself and her brute-levels of strength provided by her enhanced musculature, she’s able to swing the staff quickly enough to send two people reeling before they can move out of the way. She catches the crowbar from the third on her shield before shoving him back, and the fourth hit her armour with a bat that simply bounces off of it. As she rises from her crouched position, the thugs still left standing warily retreating a few steps back, she finds that she very nearly towers over them, the thick armour and added mass enlarging her frame and height by quite a few inches.

“Drop your weapons and leave,” Metanoia tries again, the dual tones of her voice echoing in the confines of the store.

The two looters look at each other, uncertain, before even more people push their way into the shop, levelling a haphazard assortment of guns at Metanoia.

Abaddon bellows to her ally “I cannot do much more for you than block the windows and let the funnel through the doorway.” She contorts her hands violently, pulling two clothing shelves from the back of the clothing store and drags them to the windows, yelling to the looters below “Get away from the windows unless you want to be crushed by shelves,” she announces as the shelves are pulled throw the window along with a few clothing racks they had dragged with them. The looters back away from the window just in time to avoid being crushed.

“You’re on your own now Metanoia,” she mutters quietly to herself before moving to the top of the remaining pile of cars. “You have seen what I can do if you do not leave now you will end up in a hospital or worse,” she leaves the last word hanging before raising her hands in the direction of a storefront. She contorts her now normal looking hands, pulling a signboard off the front of a shop and dangling it over the mass of people gathering at the base of the burning cars. Most of them move away from where the sign is floating, others run to try to join the group fighting Metanoia and a couple run off down the street, done with this shit.

Metanoia charges the moment the shelves fly toward the windows, taking advantage of the distraction that Abaddon provided. A few of them aren’t caught off guard, managing to fire a few bullets before Metanoia barrels into them, lashing out with her staff. She winces internally as she hears their bones snap like sticks of celery, but doesn’t let the sound stop her as she continues swinging before they can regroup.

It takes a few seconds and a few friendly fire incidents, but someone finally gets their head on straights and starts shouting orders. “Hold her down!” someone screams. “People with knives, use them!”

Metanoia shakes someone off of her arm, jabs her staff into the temple of someone trying to climb onto her back, and stomps the person clinging onto her foot into the ground with a sickening crack, but she’s still heavily outnumbered. The joints on her armour are articulated, modelled after the examples she spent hours painstakingly researching and refining, but there are still gaps thin enough for tiny blades to slip through, cold metal digging into her skin.

Then someone jumps onto her head, blocking her vision momentarily, and she feels a thin object slide through the eye-slits. It burns momentarily before she can clamp down on the pain and she spasms, her armour immediately growing jagged and spiked as she rips the person off from her head and crushes their arm.

“Abaddon, I’m getting swarmed,” Metanoia shouts, blood dripping from her helmet.

Abaddon barely hears the sound of Metanoia, only really making out the word Abaddon, but assuming with the large crowds that she needed help. She floats off of the pile of burning cars, moving back to the entrance of the shop to see if she can tell what's happening inside. She moves the signboard next to the window out the front before slamming it into the crowd of people, trying to push their way into the store. The sign knocks over the crowd, pushing them over out the front of the other window, leaving the board on top of them, Abaddon looks around the street quickly trying to find anything else she could use to clear out some of the people inside the store.

A couple of shops down she notices an auto repair shop, with tyres stacked out the front in fancy patterns, presumably to make the shop look more alluring to customers. Once more her hands contort, and as they return to normal her wrists connect back to her forearms, taking control of two of the tyres. She brings them over and lines them up with the front of the door way, one in front of the other.

“DUCK OR GET OUT THE WAY META” Abaddon yells hoping to get the message across to the girl, before throwing one tyre at the back of one of the looters standing in the doorway. The tyre hits the looter, throwing them forward into the people in front of him, making a domino effect as they topple over.

Metanoia dives through the side, feeling blades rip themselves out of her flesh as she brings herself and a few others down to the ground. A ripple runs through the mass of frenzied looters as the tire throws them off their feet, and Metanoia takes that opening to drag herself up from the ground and toward the doorway, the barbs on her armor tearing through clothing and skin as she pushes her way through the throng. The screams of the injured and the scent of blood in the air make for a heady scent in the confines of the store, and she nearly trips over a body as she continues using her staff and her spiked armor to deter anyone still trying to climb on top of her.

Abaddon sees a slightly taller shape through the doorway and yells once more “DUCK,” waiting just a moment before throwing the second tyre straight through the entrance. Once the tyres leaves her control she turns and grabs the last of the two burning cars, moving them to hover above the doorway.

Another opening in the crowd appears as the second tire plows through the mob of looters. Metanoia brings up her shield and just charges, only a few of the more foolish or perhaps brave looters attempting to grab onto the jagged edges of her armor. Two of them are shoved through through the doorway as Metanoia throws herself forward. They skid along the pavement, stopping after a few feet in a bruised and blood mess as Metanoia catches herself and turns back toward the store.

As Metanoia runs out, Abaddon lowers the cars quickly, blocking off the entrance before any can escape. “I’m glad to see you’re doing alright,” Abaddon says with a slightly cheery tone, seeing the blood splattered armour. Abaddon turns around to look at the mostly deserted streets, the last of the people running away or groaning in pain below signboard. She grabs the scattered cars two at a time moving them to block the windows to the store as well, before finally lowering herself to the ground.

“How was that for a fight?” She asks, a little wobbly on her feet, having missed the part where her legs had reformed, just nor attached themselves to her torso yet. “I heard it got a little crowded in there,” she adds chuckling.

Metanoia takes a moment to steady herself, adrenaline still pumping through her veins, before she nods. “You could say that,” she says, attempting to inject levity into her voice. “They managed to get my eye, so I had to resort to doing, well, this.” She gestures to the blood dripping from the barbs on her armor. “We should call this in to the PRT and perhaps get an ambulance for the people inside, some of them are quite heavily injured.”

“How about we get that breakfast first?” She offers pointing to a small cafe untouched at the end of the road. “I heard they had lovely coffee and decent baked goods” She adds starting to walk in the direction of the store.

Metanoia tilts her head, then nods, wiping away the congealing blood covering one of her helmet’s eye-slits. “I’d enjoy that,” she says. “I can leave some money behind for the goods we take, I still have some cash in my wallet...which is in your backpack.”

“Oh… you might have to give me a bit to revert and then if you must you can call the PRT,” she says not really understanding the value of calling the PRT and or even remotely caring for the people who attacked us. She also then considers that maybe she’s missing something due to the side effects of using her power.

“Ah, so you can’t revert at will?” Metanoia asks, dissolving some of her mass so her footsteps sound less like stomping on the pavement. “That’s alright, it’s not like we could have anticipated this situation.”

Abaddon opens the door to the shop, taking note of the smashed cash register sitting on the counter. “It looks relatively untouched,” she says, gesturing toward a vacant table sitting in the middle of the room, with a view of the street. “What would you like?” she asks, awkwardly trying to sit down at the table in her breaker form.

Metanoia lets out a relieved sigh as she slides down into her chair, the metal and plastic creaking under the weight of her armor. “I haven’t been here before, and I’ve made it my mission to sample all the donuts in this city, so maybe just...all the donuts that are still okay?”

“Give me a sec,” Abaddon says before contorting a hand in a painful looking manner, using her powers to pull the display case of donuts over, using her other hand to pull a second table against ours, placing the donut display case atop the new table. “Take your pick,” she says, sliding the case open. “They seem to be untouched.”

“Wow,” Metanoia says, her eyes widening under her helmet. “Thank you. I think I have enough cash for this…” The already-thinned helmet on her head bubbles and dissolves in a few seconds, leaving her mouth free as she grabs a frosted donut at random. There’s no trace of her eye injury, lacking even the blood that had been spilled.

Taking a bite of the donut, she chews daintily and swallows before speaking. “So, how long does it usually take for you to leave your breaker form…”