Erith: Games and Faces 1

Kerith stood slowly, pulling her armor and chestplate off from the shirt underneath; carefully she removed the next part of her armor, setting aside the knives, darts, garrote - she might have surrendered her technology and offered to surrender her blaster but they seemed incapable of comprehending a threat.

Or perhaps they had and she'd missed some communication, they had certainly kept her under some measure of watch. She suspected her bluff had been bought though - the Aristocra knew some of the game she had put herself in position to play but even he did not know the depths of... devotion? As long as the project served the goals she had been trained to protect, she saw no reason to not help.

Red eyes narrowed to slits as she carefully pulled the tie holding her hair back, letting it fall freely.

The conversation and demonstration from the Aristocra had left her...

Unsettled was the best word.

She hadn't known such a basic movement, one he claimed she should have known the counter for. The sting against the side of her neck was more a bruise on her pride than a real bruise on skin, the Chiss rubbing the location the jab had gotten through her defenses, feeling it as keen as Kobus felt her correctional jabs when she had taught him some of knife fighting.

The pity in his eyes, in all of their eyes, had begun to grow uncomfortable, sitting at-odds with the way Kerith knew the world was ordered. The insistence that she would have a place aboard the Csillan Rose later, that she would desire such a thing was enough to make the Chiss pause; pity and an open offer of help were strange bedfellows in her world, ones not commonly seen.

She finally picked the tie for her hair back up, swiftly pulling the strands sharply back into a ponytail again, tightly tugging it all back into place. She'd settle her mind kinetically since letting it run in circles was not doing her any good; she reached out, picking up one of the many daggers from her pile of divested weaponry and heading towards the practice area, flipping it in her palm as if getting used to the weight again.

Her greeting as she walked up to the first target dummy was to throw the blade with a flick of her wrist, sinking it into the dummy's right eye. It wouldn't do for her confusion to affect her work further, after all.

---

The nightmare was quick, brief, painfully sharp in its lesson - senseless and faceless something stood, waiting at an edge just beyond where she could see. It pressed in like a beast though - hunting, hounding, howling behind and around her and she started to run. Breath pounded in her lungs as she skidded down unfamiliar hallways, slipping in her footing and taking a tumble. She turned the momentum into a roll with her hands flailing for balance as she found herself fallen to her feet, stopped. Scrambling Kerith pushed back to her feet, head turning as if looking for what hunted her down the hall behind.

Nothing.

A roar and a crash to her left and the Chiss woman threw herself aside on instinct, instinct which saved her as something raked the ground she had been crouching on, claws breaking the plascrete in rivets, flecks and dust clouding the immediate vicinity.

The break in its stride sent the woman running again, a new direction picked as if the halls were something she knew. It tugged at the woman's mind as she ran before the familiarity dawned on her, a mental map of the building clicking into place. Two lefts and a long corridor would put her at the practice field of the facility she'd first been trained at. It felt like a race to stay alive, lungs burning with effort as she ran and felt the entity giving chase behind her now that her running was not blind, now that she had a goal in mind.

When she reached the practice field the dream shifted for a moment to a face, a feeling of inevitability as instead of a beast simply a man started to round the walk- and Kerith felt herself thrown into wakefulness with a start as the pain began.

Red eyes blinked in confusion, feeling like there was a sliver, a crack in the facades and masks that there shouldn't be. The pain sent a phantom shiver across her frame, convinced for a moment that it had been more than just a dream.