The dull chattering of harsh laughter grated in the back of her skull.

With a start, consciousness returned to her. That just made the noises worse. She was so accustomed to the peace and quiet of nature, the hum or buzz of insects and wildlife, the whisper of the wind. Not to be overly poetic. Anyway, the sudden change was an unwelcome one. Her sensitive ears twitched at each sound that she heard.

"…leave her there…"

"…trapped for hours…"

"…a dumb bitch. Nice one."

The words seemed almost unfamiliar – perhaps it was the context, or the inflection, or the voices that spoke them – but she recognized the cruel intent behind them. It was then that she finally took better stock of her situation.

The reason her body was so stiff was because she'd been packed, utterly crammed, into a tiny space that was practically unfit for a child. To heap insult upon that, it had been largely filled up with a disgusting assortment of what appeared to be bloody pads smelling strongly of bodily fluids. A growl rumbled low in her throat. The people outside the cramped prison were laughing at her.

There were few times in her life had she actually been mocked. It was an incomprehensible thought to her. Life was about improvement, first of the self and then of others. She'd come out on the top of anything that she'd worked for, at least for as long as she could remember. From her memories, people were taught respect for those in authority, for the elders and betters. She'd been of the latter category, young as she was. This situation was already unfamiliar and confusing; the mockery on top of it was downright alien.

But that was no matter – she had always had a particularly effective method of coping with her feelings.

She pulled back an arm as far as she could in the claustrophobic space, mentally grinning as she felt her muscles bunch and flex, and punched forward once. One blow was all it took to tear through the door of the small locker like paper.

The once aggravating laughter turned into screams of terror that seemed to rip straight into her eardrums. She crouched over with a wince, covering her ears to block out the sounds. As she did so, she caught sight of her reflection in a puddle of water that was slowly leaking from an abandoned water bottle.

A large, bipedal tiger stared back at her.

At least some things haven't changed in this crazy world, Tigress thought.

But perhaps the situation was not looking as bright as Tigress had hoped. Just as she was recovering from the loud voices of the children, a siren blared throughout the halls. It was louder and more invasive than even the warning gongs of the Valley although she suspected through the jaw-clenching pain that she was experiencing in her sensitive ears that it served a similar purpose.

She'd dealt with far worse pain before, though. This might not be an obstacle to be physically overcome, but Master Tigress could fight through it regardless. With a grunt of exertion, the young kungfu master leaped high to shatter the source of the siren with a single kick. The noise died only slightly, meaning there were still more. She growled in annoyance. Was it worth it to seek out the other alarms?

She didn't have a chance to answer that question herself. A squad of armed creatures was making its way down the maze of hallways towards her, and if the slight draft of air that was buffeting her whiskers was any indication, that same direction was her only way out. She'd have to fight her way through them. Her left paw balled into a fist, each knuckle cracking slowly, loud as a firecracker. In the next instant she was racing on all fours, fast enough to cover the length of the hallway in a single heartbeat.

With a splintering of wood she barreled through the doors at the end of the corridor, paws scrabbling against the tile floor to get a grip. Her claws dug into the linoleum and she began moving towards the exit in earnest. Time was against her, she had no idea where she was, and the sirens were only serving to throw off her concentration. Tigress had been in enough battles to recognize that this was not an ideal situation.

Racing through the hallways only compounded her confusion. The muted hues that painted the building were the widest array of colors that she'd ever seen. Each room that she passed seemed to have half a dozen of the shrieking alarms. On top of it all, her body was buzzing with unfamiliar energy; it seemed to boil up from her guts all the way to right underneath her fur, threatening to explode her from the inside out.

Tigress reached the exit doors at the same time that the armed men burst through them, but she reacted faster. The black barrels that each soldier wielded were harshly reminiscent of Lord Shen's cannons – except that these were sleek and dark, their appearance more evocative of Viper's form than that of a wyrm. Shen's dragonesque cannons had been a sign of his power, as much for show as the fireworks that they had been derived from; these weapons, Tigress knew, were all business.

The first soldier through the door raised his hand-cannon towards her, parting his lips to bark an order or perhaps to call for help. But Tigress was already upon him, batting his weapon to the side hard enough to crack it into three pieces. Her leg shot out in midair, punting him backwards through the loosely swinging doors behind him. Still moving, she swept the legs from beneath the next man forcefully enough that his head bounced against the floor.

The single remaining man raised his cannon to take aim at her so she kicked it upwards which sent a hail of flying metal into the ceiling. Tigress reached behind herself to rip the door off a locker and smacked the man in his helmeted face so hard that the metal practically wrapped around his head. She shoved a paw into his helmet to casually toss him aside into the wall of lockers and then moved to exit the building.

Three massive, foreboding carriages were parked in a wide semicircle around the exit, each gleaming black and emblazoned with strange symbols that Tigress recognized as some sort of foreign language. More important to her at the moment than the alien environment, however, was the small group of soldiers that had been waiting in a tense silence. As soon as she'd run through the swinging doors, the men had raised their firearms.

Tigress leapt into the air at the closest soldier, forward and slightly to the left of the short staircase that she stood upon. The men opened fire with their cannons.

A billowing cloud of white foam exploded from three of the cannons that were fired by the men to Tigress' right. Yet another cannon fired a pair of sparking wires, and the final one released a hail of gray pellets. Tigress shifted her weight to land sooner than she'd planned, several meters short of the first soldier. The snow-white cloud passed over her head, separating her from him. Then she doubled back to charge the foam-spraying soldiers who were woefully unprepared for her. Only a single clod of white foam landed on Tigress' vest before she took them out.

Two men remained.

The black-suited, black-helmeted men seemed to be hesitating, backing up and shouting orders into the boxes on their shoulders. Fortunately for Tigress, despite the obvious differences in script here, the spoken language appeared to be similar enough, if a bit harsher in its sound. One of the men waved his hand, barking instructions to the other. "Pull back! Assault and Velocity are inbound. They'll handle this from here."

Tigress didn't fully understand what that meant, but she didn't want to stick around to find out. She crouched down until her tail brushed against the steps that she was standing on, feeling the air. Then, bunching the muscles in her legs so that she could feel the power rippling through her body, Tigress jumped. Her first bound sent her flying over the black carriages, wind whistling in her ears, and she landed in a three-point stance at the edge of the concrete lot. The ground cracked under her paws.

She shot a look back over her shoulder to catch the men gaping at her, took a second to relish the look of shock on their faces, and started sprinting on all fours due north. Once she got her bearings on the local terrain, she'd be able to pick her confrontations in the future. If she could smell the soldiers coming, even better.

So lost in her thoughts was Tigress, she almost didn't realize that a streak of red was keeping pace with her on her right side, at the edge of her peripheral vision. It was a man. As soon as Tigress took notice of him, he turned and waved at her cheekily. Tigress dug her claws into the ground suddenly, leaving a row furrows in the pavement, to pull a hard left, but the man kept up effortlessly.

It pissed her off.

Shifu had trained her since she was a child, though, and each day he had drilled his lessons into her head. Tigress was far from a novice in a fight and she sure as hell wasn't going to let some punk in a red suit show her up. He was fast, true, much faster than her, but Tigress could make her own advantage. The first step would be controlling the environment.

At this point, Tigress and her pursuer were passing by row after row of tall, narrow houses. Judging the distance, Tigress unsheathed her claws again and kicked herself off the ground into the side of a building. Her paws only scraped the building wall for half a second before she propelled herself back towards the road in an arcing backflip.

She hit the ground fist-first and hard enough to send a shockwave rippling through her immediate area. The street under and around her was torn apart into a web of cracks, small pieces of rubble flew through the air, and her red shadow came to a skidding, stumbling halt. It was the moment Tigress had been waiting for. She threw a punch at him with her massive paw; his dodge was clumsy, off balance. The next blow clipped him the shoulder, making him stagger back.

There was a…dissonance in the man's reaction, though. She'd thrown an exaggerated punch and elicited an under-exaggerated response from her target. Typically, her harder-hitting blows could send even Po flying through the air. Once again, Tigress wondered what was wrong with this strange world.

"Alright, let's wrap this party up right now," a voice behind her said. Her ears had been twitching before the newcomer even spoke up, and at his words she whirled around to slam her fist into his chest—only for her fist to rebound off of the man's torso, which in turn made her whole body bounce back like a toy. Tigress practically skipped like a stone two or three times before she rolled to a stop. There was a sharp twinge in her arm, but it was gone by the time she rose to her feet and adopted a fighting stance. These messed up reactions to her punches were only making her more annoyed.

"Whoa, now," the red-suited speedster soothed as he dashed up to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the bouncy-chested man. He raised his hands in an attempt to placate her, not that it made Tigress feel any better about the situation. "Let's all calm down and try to talk things out, hm? I'm Velocity, the bouncer over here is Assault. We just came to try and talk to you – we know there must be a lot going on in your head right now with this whole trigger thing, you might be scared or conf—"

Tigress' ears flattened against her head and she let out a low, rumbling growl. It served to stop Velocity's overenthusiastic stream of nonsense. "I am not scared," Tigress snarled at him. "I don't know what you're talking about. I don't even know where I am. You think I belong here, but I obviously don't. That's the only problem here."

It appeared to be Assault's turn to step forward. "That's all good then, ma'am. As members of the Protectorate, we're well-equipped to help out any parahuman in need of assistance." He smirked. "And don't worry, there's no surprise fee if you're under the impression that we're just really dedicated door-to-door salesman."

Tigress glowered at him with suspicion, but sheathed her claws and relaxed her position. She was a warrior, first and foremost, and a large part of that meant knowing when to pick a fight and when not to. No wise warrior would throw herself into a fight when her enemy was willing to stand down. Peace was always preferable to complicating the conflict.

"Either your 'Protectorate' isn't as popular as you think, or something's wrong here, because I've never heard of you. But—" Tigress raised a paw to silence Velocity before he could run his mouth off again, "I'll consent to go with you, as long as its not as a prisoner."

At this point, Tigress could only hope that she hadn't revealed too much information about who she was or what she was doing here – which she wasn't too sure of herself in the first place. This whole journey had been disorienting from the very start and Tigress wasn't quite ready to spill her guts to a former opponent. The two costumed men exchanged a glance before turning to her with wide smiles.

"That's all we can ask for," Assault assured her.