Context is Overrated [Giza/Aurora]

Blue Jay knew it was going to be sooner rather than later that his attempts to drench the sky were going to get found out, and whoever did was not likely going to be willing to just talk it over, but he hadn’t been expecting his opposition to come immediately following his shock wave. Most certainly not unannounced; most supers and police at least had the courtesy to shout a ‘hey you’ before attacking. Blue Jay had hardly any time to notice the spears from, let alone get out of the way. His reaction time was so that he jumped upwards in reaction to the blades going for his feet, of all the odd places, but this only spared one. He let out a yell of pain as the spear bore into his left foot, perhaps somewhat drowned out by the sound of the second crashing into the spot where his right hand been not even an instant before.

Reflexively, Blue Jay teleported back. He didn’t displace; rather, he completely vanished from the spot where he’d been pinned to a location about a foot backwards - and hit the finished caged as he tried to take another step backwards. The sudden appearance of the ice behind him made him have to catch himself, and this spiting foot was not helping with the attempt. His right hand shot out behind him to try to grab onto the ice behind him to steady himself and his other raised his drawn sword up defensively in front of his chest. He searched for the source of the attack, but he didn’t have to look long.

“Giza?!” This wasn’t good. For whatever reason, this Pandaemonium had decided he hated Blue Jay’s guts. He’d said, last they met, that he wanted him to stay away from Aurora, but why anything he had to do with Aurora had anything to do with Giza was a mystery to Blue Jay.

He pulled himself back onto his feet, standing gingerly on the pierced one, and teleported again. He appeared about a yard away from the edge of the cage. Keeping his stance wide, he raised the sword so it was horizontal before his chest and rested his right hand against the cloth guard that covered the first five or so inches of the sword’s top edge from the hilt. Blue Jay’s brow lowered. “What do you want?”

His confusion translated into his expression. “That’s some grade A conspiracy theorizing there, Giza, and I honestly think you might have a bit of an obsession with Aurora. What I’m not sure about is why you’ve drug me into it-”

Blue Jay heard the creak of shifting metal behind him. The corner of his eye caught movement. The beam didn’t register as that until he’d already turned and swung his blade to counter the large metallic projectile, catching the front face of it against the edge of his blade with inhuman speed. The blade bore into the metal, digging several inches into it despite the bulk of the force of the impact coming from the beam’s momentum.

The first of the daggers dug into his shoulder. In order to counter the beam from behind, he’d spun so his back faced Giza, and that’s where the blade had struck. Blue Jay gritted his teeth, trying not to let his stance falter. The next of the daggers entered his leg.

Blue Jay teleported again. The final daggers flew past where he had been and the sliced metal beam hit the ground with a heavy crash. One of the three - the barrage of daggers had come so quickly, he’d only had time to react to avoid the last of them. Two in the shoulder, one in the leg. His blood ran warm down his back and leg. The cuts weren’t so deep that they’d pierced anything particularly important, but his movements stressed the injuries.

Drawing in a breath, he turned to face Giza. He didn’t know why the magician was attacking him, and with this much ferocity. Blue Jay had nothing against Giza, but if he was inviting a fight, he couldn’t expect him not to fight back.

Blue Jay displaced. The movement was instantaneous, and when he reappeared, he was inches from Giza’s face. Bringing the blade over his shoulder, he swung at Giza’s upper left arm with almost blinding speed. Then, once blade had entered flesh, he would let out a small shock wave. The force would blast at the cut and push Giza with about the force of if Blue Jay himself had tackled that one spot on his arm.

The injuries Giza had given him left him unbalanced after this maneuver. It happened fast enough that the strike would be finished before he could set down his left foot, and when he did, pain shot through his leg and he had to suppress a grunt of pain. His shoulder burned with the swing. He hoped the shock wave, not even close to the amount of power he’d shot at the water had Giza been watching previous, would be enough of a bluff to get him to back off. Blue Jay did not like the prospect of continuing this fight given the amount of damage Giza had already caused.

The stench of oil was one of the worst things one could smell during battle. Getting said oil on you was stage one of ‘you’re screwed’. Blue Jay visibly flinched when he was coated with and realized he was coated with oil, his eyes growing wide. He knew what was coming next.

He shot off a single shockwave - horizontal, fired wide in his best guess as to where Giza had wandered after his disappearing act. The wave ripped into the walls of the building, tearing at concrete and steel across the entire span of the wall. It was because of this moment spent attempting to retaliate that he did not get out of the way before the fire lit the oil.

Blue Jay yelped and raised his hands reflexively to guard his face. His feet moved unconsciously, displacing from the spot where the fire exploded an instant before. But the bulk of the damage had already been done. Blue Jay reappeared above the water, off balance and backwards due to the odd positioning of his displacement, and still on fire. He hit the water with his back.

The cold sea water offered some relief to the smaller burns on his right arm, lower chest, and right leg, but his right shoulder, which he’d turned to take the first of the fireball, felt nothing. All of the clothing on that shoulder, his hoodie and t-shirt, were entirely gone. Patches of the rest of his outfit, mostly on his right side and centered around his shoulder, were now cinders. His cuts stung with the salt of the water.

He allowed himself only a moment to breath - or to not breath, as he was submerged below the still lightly wavering water, but to recover from the sudden fireball and jump. He swam to the surface, taking a gasp of air once he breached it. He began paddling back to the edge of the docks so he could get his arms up onto the wood and pull himself out.

Through this, Blue Jay had still maintained grip on his sword. It was the one thing, above all else, that he needed to do. It'd become so ingrained in his fingers that he’d been knocked out with the blade still in his hands before.

Even though she sent Giza to look at some of the less traveled areas of the docks so she would have more time to take care of other things, her own business finished up much more quickly than expected. Everything was far from stable, but people knew what to expect and what to do now. It meant she didn't have to spend nearly as much time micromanaging everything, at least until she had to be a substitute for heavy machinery and vehicles. That was not needed right at this moment however, so she was able to also look in the less traveled areas of the docks to see if she could snuff out some more rats, whether they be literal rats or metaphorical ones.

Because of that goal, Aurora wasn't flying through the air as usual. Instead, she was on the ground, the metal parts of her boots in her aurora instead of on her feet. She still wasn't exactly quiet, and her aurora was still bright, though its brightness was at least tempered by the fact that most of the light was blocked by the tall buildings throughout the area. There wasn't much out here besides old abandoned warehouses and the occasional decrepit factory, neither of which were exactly small. It was the closest thing she could do to stealthing when she didn't want to drop everything in her aurora. At this point she had gotten so used to dealing with rats that she could handle them running. There was no need to try too hard.

On her way through the area, she heard a distant voice and she was quite certain that she heard her name. Something about lurking around the docks too. It sounded like Giza. Did he find something? Aurora quickly changed her course and started running at full speed in that direction, still staying on the ground and keeping her aurora behind the buildings. As she got closer, the voices got clearer. Something about a promise? What was he talking about? She heard a second voice that didn't take long for her to place at all. She had talked to Blue Jay enough that she could recognize that voice anywhere. Conspiracy theories and obsessions about her? At first she thought she might be mishearing, but no, it sounded like the two of them were talking about her. Then suddenly there were sounds of a fight, and Giza screamed something about being on fire. She didn't have a full picture of what was going on, but it wasn't too hard to guess the important parts. They were definitely fighting, but about what? About her? That seemed absurd and unlikely, but they were definitely talking about her. What happened?

Auroa's eyes narrowed and she took to the sky to get there faster. Just as she was getting over one of the buildings she was behind, she saw Giza carrying an unconscious figure into a nearby building. Given the context, she somehow doubted he was helping him. She was able to close the distance quickly, given she didn't have the heavy metal parts of her shoes on to weigh her down. She opened a hole in the side of the abandoned factory, crashing down onto the ground in front of it. The sound of her arrival paled in comparison to the volume of her voice.

"Giza, what the hell are you doing?" she yelled. "When I said to look around here for suspicious activity this was not what I had in mind!"

“Oh, Miss Aurora,” Giza turned quickly to the direction where he heard her voice from, “I-I didn’t notice you were coming.”

He didn’t realize that Miss Aurora finished up her work over at the slum so quickly. There were a lot of thing that need to be rebuild and such, so he figured it would take her at least a day of work to maybe finished it. Yet here she is, probably coming over to check up on him when she finished with her work. In a way, he was glad that she show-up; he didn’t think she genuinely care about what he was doing. After all, she did just send him over at the dock to look for anything suspicious without really bashing her eyelash.

But now she’s here, Giza feel all fluster up once again. He couldn’t look at her directly, thanks to a certain teammate who pulled some perverted stunt. Every time he take a look at her, that stupid image always flash before his eyes, and soon everything just become too awkward to handle. When she told him to get over at the dock earlier today, he couldn’t even gave her an assertive answer; all he can do is stuttering his response and make the whole situation uncomfortable.

“W-Well, I…I found t-this B-b-Bulwark s-snooping around our t-turf, s-so-”

He didn’t get a chance to finish his report to her when Blue Jay started to cough the sea water in his airway, ruining the whole mood of the situation. In a matter of second, he started to vomit all over the floor; talk about being a disgusting pig. Lucky for him that Miss Aurora came by the way she did, otherwise Blue Jay over here would have went on living with a missing hand. He then looked at the bonesaw he held in his hand as soon as Blue Jay finally stop puking:

“Disarming you, duh. You hold on to that sword so tightly that I figured I cut if off in case you wake up and started to swing them all over the place again.”

Blue Jay blinked, letting what Giza said sink in. His hand shot to his left wrist, as though to confirm it was indeed still there. “You were going to cut off my hand?! Giza, what the hell?!” What kind of finishing move was that supposed to be? He’d already gone and lit him on fire and Giza had known he was knocked out if he’d dragged him here. He’d won, as much as Blue Jay hated to admit it. Was that not enough for him?

He was going to ignore Aurora’s comment about him not being a threat. He also chose to ignore the blatant difference in Giza’s voice when he was talking to Aurora versus him. “I was just practicing my powers out here where there aren’t any people to bother when Giza came and attacked me out of nowhere. Then he said something about staying away from you before shooting at me with daggers and metal beams, and then he chucked gasoline at me and lit it on fire.” He shot another glare at his previous advisory. “And apparently he thought it was okay to take a bonesaw to my wrist while I was knocked out because my lungs were full of water.”

He looked down at his ruined hoodie and shirt. This was more than a bit of stitching was going to be able to fix. He really hoped the same would not be said about his injuries. A thin line of red was trailing from him to mix with the very wet floor of the dock house and subside into the gently lapping water. His head was feeling the beginning of the blood loss; not bad, but it could get worse if nothing was done. He considered taking off his hoodie and using that to stop the bleeding as it was all but ruined anyway, but it was also soaked in seawater.

A simpler solution occurred to him. “Aurora, you’ve got a first aid kit, don’t you? Do you mind?” His words came out a little sharper than he meant them to, but he felt the situation was cause for a bit of aggravation.