n o//h e r o e s ]]

Chapter 1: no//heroes]]

The dark and shiny ground makes Mika's shoes squeak softly when she steps, but at least she's light enough on her feet that even the squeaks are soft. The gold and silver walls of the museum are quite haunting in a beautiful way, and she's a little embarrassed to be making so much noise in such a nice place. Her coat doesn't rustle at all, though, which is good; she turned the hood inside out so it didn't make a ton of noise in the quiet. At night, the place is so much nicer than during the day; no one to herd her out of this section because it's "not for kids" to look at ancient weapons of bygone civilizations, or to watch the demonstrators demonstrate how they work on ballistics gel. That's for the adults to watch, for them to pay to watch metal streaked with glowing blue and pink grow spikes as it's jammed into a simulated torso, then shift those spikes into hooks and pull out smoothly without ever appearing to change shape. Mika herself is a big fan of the black crystalline knives somehow sharper than obsidian, yet never breaking, or cutting allies even when the blade is drawn smoothly across their throat.

The glass containers reflect her face as enshrouded in fire and Mika reaches into her coat to pat the pet snake she brought out here to see the weapons. "Remix? Doing alright?"

Don't ask, the snake says, and sticks the upper part of his body out around her shoulders to give his golden-blue wings some breathing room. Mika scratches under his chin and enters the museum hall after picking the lock to get in. They're all so pretty. No one knows how they're made anymore, or how exactly magic flows off of them like water, but Mika does. The answer: intertwine your spell with the metal and it'll obey your command almost exactly. It's sentient metal. And it's Mika's job to free said sentient metal from its confines and give it to the people who'll actually give that sentient metal an exercise for once in their lives.

"Come on, Mixer Supreme," she says to the snake, and it hisses in annoyance. Not my name. "I'll let you have a chocolate if you help me out." Fine.

The glass in every display case shatters. The silent alarms start going off; the timer begins in Mika's head. Night security has already been alerted. That's one minute. It'll take another five for police to get here, so that makes it one minute to grab everything and four minutes to get out. "Remix, two chocolates if you can get--" The snake shoots out of her jacket, gliding silently on those metallic wings and twining around everything in the weapons gallery she could handle and slithering into the legally distinct bag of holding she has with them. Mika slips it under the coat of her jacket-- thirty seconds--and hightails it out of there. She runs back to the door, hand on the handle, and nearly runs into it in her effort to open it without slowing down. Locked. The doors must automatically do that to trap any thief in here. Twenty seconds. Mika curses.

She does what anyone worth their salt would: she climbs. Say what you want about Mika, but strength and stamina in climbing are one of the things she is not lacking in at all. She's been climbing trees to the top since she was a child. Well, a smaller child. In contrast, the walls are no problem, with windows all the way up to the ceiling and plenty of windowsills to stand on, not to mention all the gold and silver worked in thick swells big enough to act as a handhold.

I can help. The snake is still in her bag, but she can hear his hiss in her mind. Using telepathy now, huh? "I'm not buying you another chocolate! I can do this!" Five seconds. She's only halfway to the ceiling. The guards burst in, and her new mental timer starts ticking. Best to be gone in three minutes rather than four. This is a very nice museum; the police might spend less time getting there than they would spend on a less reputable establishment like a restaurant. There aren't very many reputable restaurants in this part of the city.

Mika pulls herself up the next windowsill and crouches in it, hiding from the bullets that start zinging past. They're just rubber bullets, but they'll still hurt like hell if they hit her. And if one hits her hand while she's holding onto something-- with no better ideas, she pulls the hood up to cover her hair and lets her sleeves cover her hands and wrists. The guards stop firing when they see the spiked horns of the hood appear on her silhouette. She can tell they're weighing the options: attack her, the person who they've probably signed at least two waivers and NDAs about if they've worked in the security field for any amount of time, or risk getting fired.

Mika uses the time to get moving again. She crawls up the walls like a demented squirrel, kicks open the window closest to the ceiling, pulls herself out of it, and oh wow that was a bad idea. Her legs are still dangling out of the window, but the rest of her is out, and it's high up and windy. Scary. Not to chicken out, but pulling herself onto the roof seems one hell of a task now. She can hear Remix start to offer help again, and shuts him up without really thinking any words, instead rolling back her sleeves and standing on the windowsill, reaching her hand up to the ceiling ledge.

Too short.

She looks back in her bag. Spike, sword, knife, sword, sword... hook. She can practically hear the metal screaming at her, and when her fingers close around it, she can hear it in her mind. "Let me out! Let me butcher!"

"You'll get your butchering later!" Mika whisper-yells. In the back of her head, Remix is shrieking in fury that she would let someone else in. It's giving her a headache. "Help me get up onto the ceiling and I'll make sure you work with someone who loooves to butcher."

The hook thrums in her hand, a silent resonance going through the metal. Mika takes that as an okay to dig the hook into the ceiling and use it to pull herself up. She really needs some new knives. Her old ones would have served perfectly well for this one, but they were confiscated last time she got arrested, and the police force seems to be using them now. She paid a lot for those knives. Anyway, this should serve her perfectly well, and it does; she manages to wriggle onto the roof. It's even windier up here, and she feels like she's going to be blown off the roof at any moment, but if she is, it's okay. She'll just have to buy Mixer Supreme a third chocolate after he flies her down. Even so, she doesn't want to have to spend money on a third chocolate when she's been saving all of that money on getting a bomb.

(Not one that could hurt anyone, but a dark bomb, named for the way it makes lights and magic go dark in equal measure. They're really expensive and super illegal, but they make wonderful wonderful diversions.)

She crouches down on the rooftop, pushing the hook back into her legally distinct bag of holding, and crawls on the roof until she reaches the other edge. It's a long, long drop down to the bottom, and there's no way she won't be noticed. That's not a problem. She just has to wait until the service she called in gets here. They're late, but they'll show up for sure, right? Yeah, her old partner bailed on her a lot of times, but he'll come through.

Mika waits until she hears sirens and has to pull back from the edge to decide yeah, he's not coming and figures that since the 300 shade she spent on the service is just barely over the cost of Remix's chocolates she can afford to ask for another favor once she gets it refunded. Why does she offer chocolates in exchange for favors? It's hard to control a demon when you've allowed yourself to be indebted to them, but it's very easy to keep a hold on them with pay. That way, the exchange is even. And Remix is a massive fan of those expensive dark chocolates from halfway across the world that cost nearly 250 shade. How on earth is an assassin service worth just 50 shade more than a chocolate? A nice apple would only be about .5 shade, and they're much larger... damn, it's crazy what her mind gets up to while she's trying to figure out how to escape from here.

"Remix," she whispers, "I need you to get me over to that building--" she points to the closest building with a fire escape she can find, "and if at all possible land on the stairs please." The snake twists out of her bag and wraps around her torso, golden wings extending until they're large enough to carry her. She looks down, and hoo boy long drop. Large, large drop, and plenty of investigators and police ready to arrest her. She can even see one of the Syn, massive once-humans covered in thick plates of keratin-covered bone, outfitted in even stronger gear. Now, she's good, but not that good. She'd be pulverized if she took on one of the Syn. "Thanks for the sight." Don't mention it.

Mika gets a running start, thinks hard about it for the last two seconds, then stops right before the edge. No way. This is way too scary. Remix could drop her! Even if he didn't, she could completely miss the fire escape, or get spotted by police. Something could go wrong! This is way, way too scary. She definitely shouldn't have decided to do this. So much for the great Mika Bladesleeve. I wanna go home, she thinks, and sits back down on the roof.

Are you gonna go?

"Maybe once they leave."

You'll be here for the next three weeks, then.

"I'm gonna be late anyway." Mika says, and digs around in the bag for anything that might help her. "Okay. Fine. I'm going. Don't let me stop."

She walks all the way over to the opposite edge of the roof this time, ducks her head, and takes off. Usually, being fast is a good thing. It means she can climb walls before anyone can catch her and slip away before anyone can even see her. This time it means that the roof drops out from under her much faster than she would like. She almost screams for a second before realizing she is safely on the fire escape of the opposite building, Remix uncurling from her waist and slithering around her arm. Her legs get a little wobbly, and she sits down hard. That was not fun. She's never doing that again. She checks in her coat for everything she needs: keycard, bank card, keychain, bag, spare change, aesthetically pleasing playing cards. Great. Everything she needs to get these metal weapons to a much better home.

Mika gets up, legs still shaky, and checks the window behind her. Unlocked. EZ. She flips it open, checking to make sure no one's in the room, and steps into it. Then she sneaks out of the front door. Now just to get far enough away fast enough that no one can find her in their area check and things are great.

What are you going to do? Remix asks her, slipping inside her still-up hood where it's warm. When do I get my chocolates?

"I'll stop by the market to get your chocolates and my groceries and rehome these things," Mika says, patting her coat pocket where the bag is. "Then I'm going to have a very long and civilized talk with Zura about what happens when he bails on me."

--

MIKA "BLADESLEEVE"

14 Y/0. FEMALE. RELATIVES UNKNOWN

COSEAN THIEF. ARMED AND DANGEROUS. KILL ON SIGHT.

"How dangerous is a fourteen year old child," Illumina asks, staring down at the three unclassified lines and the picture on the report in front of her, "that she could have a kill on sight notice hovering over her?"

"Extremely dangerous." the trainee in front of her says, holding out a note to her. "Um, I was hanging around the museum when everything happened, and the police interrogated me for hours." Illumina doesn't like the whiny tone of voice she has.

"And you're late because of that?" Illumina asks, then tosses the note into the fire. "You witnessed a burglary, that's all. Go tell those men that we will not offer our divination services for a small child they'll capture when her parents turn her in. Not to mention that there isn't enough information to divine anything about her." The trainee's fox ears droop; Illumina doesn't feel particularly bad about disciplining a chronically late child who is apparently now involved in disorganized crime. Or perhaps the trainee is just upset that Illumina will not entertain her for the millionth time about her divination technique (that rarely works) that doesn't need information. "Out."

Illumina seats herself at the desk, pushing the plaque displaying her title as Principal to the left to make room for the strongly worded letter she's about to write and stops as a pleasant voice comes from her phone. "There is a security disturbance at your home."

It's the cat, Illumina thinks, and hits the security feed anyway just in time to see someone with green hair wrapped in a pink-and-white coat slink into the window before the cam cuts off.