Another Fortunate Accident

Ch. 13 – Round and Round


Priss stared up into the false-lit night sky from the lounge chair. The leather-clad body begged the singer to rest, slumping muscles crying for relief, eyelids threatening to close under the duress. There was no rest to be found in the former Knight Saber's mind however. Any attempt at sleep was soundly repelled by the subconscious demons of her recent (and not so recent) past. So her stubborn mind, never to be denied its will, simply refused to let her body sleep… rejecting all attempts to fall into a blissful slumber.

That didn't leave many outlets to help the struggling woman. Trashing boomers was out… she wasn't going to let Sylia control her life anymore. Riding her bike was out… her failing body was too unstable to control the two-wheeled beast for more than a few minutes at a time. That basically left her voice… the healing power of music… or at least until she had abused it to the brink of ruin yesterday.

Just humming felt like trying to swallow glass down her throat now. But she tried anyway. She couldn't help it. The harmony was the only thing keeping her awake anymore, the only way I know I'm still alive . So, Priss continued to choke down the shards as she played the songs in her head. After a few more minutes, she reached the end of a song… and paused… eyelids drifted shut as her mind shut down…

…allowing another nightmare to grab hold of her subconscious, eyes flying open with the first hints of daylight greeting them, lungs demanding raspy heaving breaths to recover, sweat coating her whole body, goose bumps covering her skin, hands almost violently twitching. With frustration overwhelming her, Priss screamed into the air as loud as she could… and instantly regretted it. Both shaking hands converged to attempt to comfort the fire in her throat. She staggered back inside the trailer and jerked open the refrigerator, pulling out the last bottle of water she had. She tried chugging it, but her throat was too sore. The singer coughed up almost half of the liquid as it hit the raw flesh inside, spilling out onto the dirt covered floor of the trailer.

She heaved the bottle disgustedly across the trailer and slumped over the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. The latest dream… in her hardsuit… hitting Linna over and over… Linna's voice repeating over and over "It's alright Priss, I forgive you…" her hardsuit not responding to her commands… continuing to hammer away at her teammate… "I forgive you…"

How can you forgive me when I can't even forgive myself!

She wanted to scream out the question loud enough for Linna to hear her, but she couldn't even whisper anymore. Priss' wheeled inside the trailer and punched the opposite wall as hard as she could muster in her weakened state… her lack of energy probably the only thing keeping her from breaking half the bones in her hand. As it was, she knocked off almost half the pictures fixed to the wall. One of them came to rest at her feet… a picture of her and Maxon.

Guilt instantly followed the recollection of everything about the picture. She had treated the band like dirt… they hadn't deserved any of it. She knew they would probably follow her to Hell and back if she asked… not that she had asked their opinion in the matter. The problem was that was exactly where she was headed… and she knew it. But she didn't want to drag them down with her. They had all meant so much to each other the past couple of years… almost a family of sorts. The thoughts of the musical trio helped to calm her nerves somewhat. Times before she joined the Knight Sabers flipped through her mind. Can I ever be carefree like that again?

Priss sat down in a chair at her table and collected up the pictures, carefully placing them back on the wall one by one. Whatever happens to me, I can't let them down… not today at least… She hesitated as she noticed some writing on the back of one of the pictures. "Recipe for a Fast Recovery… i.e. What every singer should memorize before partying all night" was the title scribbled at the top, followed by a list of various household items below it. Rubbing her throat cautiously with one hand, it didn't take long for the singer to make up her mind. What the hell… can't make it much worse anyway. She walked over to the sink and poured a glass of water. She continued to a cabinet with the 'recipe' in hand, where she mixed a concoction handed down across generations of vocalists in the local club circuits. Amazingly enough, she had all the ingredients in her nearly bare cabinets. Ready, she spent the next thirty minutes gargling with the cloudy potion, replenishing her supply of home-cooked medicine twice over. Afterwards her throat felt like sandpaper, but it was still a marked improvement. "Thanks," she was able to voice to the writing before hanging it back on the wall with the other pictures.

She grabbed some cash from one of her hiding spots inside the trailer and headed out to her bike. Once mounted, she headed into the city to try and make some amends for her past indiscretions. A few bagels and some coffee for starters, but I still need to sing… maybe a few acoustic ballads or something she decided.


Nene felt almost like a new woman after 36 hours of rest… not that she had much of a choice the way her whole body had ached from head to toe. Still she considered herself lucky just to be alive. Although she didn't think anything was broken, the pain she was in the day before was so bad at one point she even considered going to a doctor… until she imagined trying to explain the circumstances behind her injuries…

"Well, you see… I'm a Knight Saber and… I was fighting this rouge boomer when… it pulled me out of a building… then my hardsuit battery died… so I fell about thirty stories or so and landed flat on my back…" Nene could imagine the doctor fainting over while watching a nurse call the psychiatric ward…

So, she had continued to pop pills and watch mind numbing daytime TV. The hacker would have much preferred to catch up on some surfing… except when she had fired up the PC, her power-supply smoked. Can anything else go wrong? she had thought to herself at the time. She was too sore to even think about heading out to a store to replace it, assuming it was just the power supply. Nene had so many barely legal add-ons hooked up to the contraption there was no telling where the fault actually was. She probably had enough spare parts to put together another complete computer, but without a working power supply, it didn't matter much.

To make matters worse, she couldn't call anyone to ask for help. The one phone she had in the house was in pieces… miscellaneous parts scavenged for a pet project to upgrade her 3D accelerator card. The other phone she owned was shattered from the hospital collision she had been involved in after visiting Linna. She hadn't had any time to replace it yet with everything that had happened since then. Now she needed to get a replacement phone, a new power supply, and to replenish her drug supply too. Maybe I should ask Sylia for a raise… she had joked to herself the day before.

The TV programming didn't provide enough in the way of a distraction to keep her mentally sane, so the bedridden teenager had let her mind wander. Her conscious thoughts were filled with the young boy she had become so preoccupied with. Mackey was so intriguing in many ways, but Nene couldn't decide exactly what it was about him that attracted her so. In the end, she had just let herself fantasize about him, about his past, about spending more time with him… not exactly a healthy way to spend a day, but it did make the time go by a bit faster, she recalled.

She sat up and stretched her arms out, noting the various aches and pains being much more tolerable now than 24 hours ago. She noted the time… "Four hours before I start the next shift… enough time to hit the stores and get my baby back on line!" she announced to Uprio-chan keeping a watchful eye over her from the nightstand.

She jumped up out of bed excitedly… only to scream out in pain, falling back into the bed. "Owowowowow…" the girl cried out in agony, rolling side to side while holding onto her right hamstring. After a few minutes of spastic torture, the leg muscle began to relax enough for her to try pushing up to an upright position. Slowly she limped towards the shower, still determined to get to the store and get on with life. "Guess I'd better take it easy for a while," she cautioned herself out loud.

With deliberate motions, the blond haired girl started the cleansing water flowing over her body, letting the pulsing fluid work its magic on her knotted muscles as well. After an extra few minutes of liquid therapy, she was ready to carefully get dressed and head out to the shops. Taking stock of her physical condition Nene thought she would be OK as long as nothing out of the ordinary happened to her… "After everything that's happened, what else could go wrong?" she asked Uprio-chan innocently as she headed out the door, limping slightly on her right leg.


Linna very reluctantly gave up sleep to find a tangled mass of sweat-coated sheets stuck to her body. She cursed out a brief sigh, biting on one finger. She ran the other hand up the side of her body, caressing her skin through the sheets. Her face was flush, heart thumping hard in her chest, skin tingling from the dream she couldn't jump back into no matter how much she wanted for it not to end. The latest dream wasn't a nightmare… quite the opposite in fact.

Linna tried desperately to hang on to the memories of her subconscious desires…She was back in the hospital in Tokyo… Priss was in the room with her… apologizing to her again… Linna wanted to tell her it was OK… she was going to be OK, somehow… "maybe together, we can get through this," Priss had told her… then… the leather-clad woman walked to her side, placing one hand soothingly over her bandage… the other took hold of Linna's hand … she drew Priss in close with that hand… she took note of every detail on her face… her hard cheeks, teardrops falling across them… soft lips, slightly quivering… her eyes, open wide to bear her soul to Linna… Linna pulled her closer, lifting her hands to gently hold each side of the singer's face, wiping away tears with shaking fingers… closer still, with lips slightly parted from the expectation of contact… then… she had passed the brink of consciousness. So close… so very close… and yet…

Linna knew what she wanted… and in a way it terrified her. The ramifications of her feelings hit hard, shaking the foundation of what she had been taught growing up. But why Priss? Why not Masaki, or someone else? she asked herself. She already knew the answer in part. Priss wasn't here… in this town… she wasn't part of her old life. Priss represented a free spirit… willing to fight the system and be the rebel that Linna wanted to be at least partially like. But could that alone add up to what I feel for her?

Maybe it's that medicine Grandma made yesterday… she tried to explain to herself. But in the end, it didn't really matter why. Linna had no idea, she just knew the way she felt… the direction her emotions pulled her heart… the direction she was so willing to follow… except that path was blocked now.

Here she was, bedridden and back at home. Linna moved one arm to cover the fresh bandage applied to her midsection, causing her to remember the part of her that lay eternally dormant now. Her life changed forever because of events of one single night. Linna hadn't planned too far in advance when she took off for Tokyo, which turned out to be a good thing now. Whatever ideas she may have had about life after the Knight Sabers were all but gone. Of course, that realization provided a bit of relief in the fact she now had a clean slate to work with. No more expectations of offspring she had to provide for her parents… no more family obligations to live up to. But it still hurt… no matter what kind of twisted logic she tried to spin it with. But what can I do now?

Linna was faced with the question of where to go from here. She could always go back to Tokyo and work for Hugh Geit. She knew she was really fooling herself if she did that without rejoining the Knight Sabers though. Hugh Geit was nothing more than a ruse to conceal the truth from her parents… to hide her true ambitions. The larger problem was the change in those ambitions. I'm not sure if I even want to be a Knight Saber anymore… Priss isn't there now, and all I did was get in the way mostly anyhow, depressed thoughts clouded her outlook as they returned to the forefront of her mind.

When Linna had first traveled to Tokyo, she only knew of the Knight Sabers as faceless people in power armor. There was an aura of mystery and intrigue that accompanied that image. However, with the Sabers unmasked, a new image replaced the old one. The image she saw more clearly than any other was of Priss. With that image came a connection… a spark provided by way of the accident. Whatever else that may had happened that night, the one thing she remembered was Priss' voice… a calm and soothing voice filled with more emotion than just concern. Linna knew it… from her dreams and also from recollections of the events at the hospital. But her fear was the connection was broken now… or perilously close to it.

She regretted the instant decision to leave Tokyo now. But with her parents there, what real choice did she have. Priss probably wouldn't have come to see her with her parents at her side anyway. It's not like she works at the office or anything so we could talk about something other than the Knight Sabers. And without the Knight Sabers, what did they really have in common anyway? But her heart wouldn't stop at that. She still wanted to try to talk with Priss somehow.

Linna looked around her room for inspiration. Maybe a letter? I've got her address somewhere… she thought, before deciding it was too slow and her handwriting while lying flat on her back wouldn't be legible anyway. Maybe I'll call her? That idea died quickly with a surprising fear of live communication with the moody woman. Linna looked over at the keyboard from her computer that her mother had set up for her. E-mail! Something about that medium seemed to feel right to her. Priss had quickly answered the E-mailed question about spending the night with her and Nene that one time, she recalled.

That decided, Linna quickly turned on the computer from her keyboard before she could change her mind. When the computer finished it's startup sequence a few seconds later, she was about to open the E-mail editor until she recognized the background image… two Knight Sabers flying through the sky from a fair distance off. The fact that the background image was of the Knight Sabers didn't surprise her at all. While searching for information on the vigilantes before she had left for Tokyo, she found a few web sites that claimed to have actual images of the mystery group. She picked some of those pictures and used them as wallpaper on her computer… but not the one she was looking at now. That picture showed two Knight Sabers… one being blue… the other green.

Could mom have done this? Her parents weren't exactly the poster couple for Wired World magazine, but her mother at least knew how to turn a PC on. She wasn't so sure about her father. Still, why would she have changed the background on the computer… unless… But why didn't she say anything when I came back before? It just didn't add up. Her hand reflexively moved the cursor over the slightly fuzzy image of the Blue Saber, tracing the curved outline of the armor against the dark sky. The action helped to remind her why she had turned on the computer in the first place. Distractedly, Linna started the E-mail program and waited… and waited… Finally when it was done loading, her eyes nearly popped out of her head… "452 unread messages! I knew I missed some people with my E-mail address change, but 452!"

Linna scrolled through the list briefly before one of the E-mails caught her eye. It was from the Knight Shadows webmaster… subject – Subscription Cancellation. "Of Course!" One of the web sites she frequented automatically uploaded new wallpaper to her PC every week as part of the subscription package… for a small fee of course. Linna had forgotten about that site until the E-mail reminder jogged her memory. That must be how the wallpaper got changed…

That mystery explained to her satisfaction, Linna open a new E-mail, typed in Priss' address, added a simple "Hi There!" into the subject line, typed in "Dear Priss," … and then proceeded to stare at the blinking cursor for the next ten minutes. It's not that she didn't know what to say… more that she couldn't decide on how to say it. She thought back to the last time that they had seen each other at the hospital… of the question she had started to ask at the time. "Priss, have you ever thought about me as more than just a teammate… maybe even more than just a friend?" … the question she never got the chance to finish. It didn't feel right typing it in now, however. She still wasn't sure why Priss had left after she had fainted, although she had her suspicions. She had to try and find out for sure. Maybe it's just a misunderstanding, she encouraged herself.

Linna typed in a few simple thoughts onto the computer screen and read them back to herself. "No… no… not like that…" she said pressing the delete button. Trying again, she typed in a few new sentences… then deleted those as well. "Let's just start off small. I'll wait for a response and go from there." She typed again… this time some brief notes about being at home, getting better, and thinking of Tokyo. She read it back a couple of times, made a few small grammar changes, and did a quick spell check. Then she signed the message almost thoughtlessly and sent it out… before realizing the way she had signed it…

"Miss you,"

"Linna"

"Oops…" Quickly she tried to recall the message before it was too late. The program instantly communicated the results of her attempt… "Message Recall Failed," it read back to her. Damn servers! Now what do I do?

She had purposely stayed away from personal feelings on the first E-mail, more intent on establishing contact rather than risk chasing Priss away. Linna was still afraid that the reason Priss left the hospital was from an adverse reaction to her kiss. Well, I could always wait and see what she says… But that idea just didn't sit well for some reason. I'd better try and explain myself … before she reads it and then adds me to her spam list…

So, Linna hurriedly typed another E-mail, then sent it out immediately… assuming worst case that Priss would be reading the first E-mail as she typed. Afterwards, she proofread what she had just sent out… and nearly fainted when she did. "I dream about you sometimes…" It made her sound more like a lovesick puppy than anything else. Images of Priss laughing hysterically at her computer filled Linna's distraught mind.

"Oh God… now what?" She frantically started yet another E-mail and began typing furiously. Her fingers didn't stop typing for the next hour as she poured her soul into characters on the screen to her side. She finished with a small note below her name…

"I still want to be part of your life, even without the Knight Sabers."

Linna checked her inbox to see if by chance Priss had already responded to her earlier E-mails. Her inbox still read "452" with no replies from the singer. Somewhat relieved, she returned to the marathon E-mail and sent the message out. Linna sighed heavily, dropping the keyboard off to the side of the bed. "All I can do now is wait." She studied the plain white ceiling for a while, holding her midsection and thinking of Priss. She tried once again to recall the events of that night… but the memories still hid from her conscious mind. "I still have no idea what really happened. Did I screw up that badly?" Thinking of the battle jogged her mind to another topic she needed to address.

Weary, she lifted the keyboard back up, noting the dull ache in her abdomen seeming to flare up from the exertion… or the stress perhaps. She started yet another E-mail… this one addressed to a different recipient.

"Dear Nene," she started to type. This E-mail was much easier to compose than the one she had just sent. Then again, Linna couldn't see how anything would be more difficult than confessing her feelings for Priss…


The young ADP dispatcher sat gingerly down in the workstation chair, careful not to aggravate the myriad of sore spots she was still nursing. Starting up her computer terminal, she let out a brief shout at the recognition of an incoming E-mail. "Linna!" Both of Nene's hands flew to cover her mouth, recalling the last time she had been caught mentioning her name in front of Leon. She peeked around to make sure no one else had noticed, and then excitedly opened the E-mail with a huge grin on her face. Slowly however, the grin began to sag… face turning neutral. A few moments later, her mouth was a deep frown, shoulders beginning to sink as well. Upon finishing the message, Nene barely had the strength to close the form and forward the note along to Sylia as requested.

Hearing it from the Knight Saber's leader was one thing… reading it directly from the source hit home a lot harder. Linna's probably never coming back… She hadn't said the words directly in the message, but that's the way it read between the lines. Just breathing became difficult for the troubled teenager, who felt years older now than she had just a few short days ago.

Slowly she rose up from her chair and walked with heavy steps up to an empty break room. Nene grabbed a cup of hot cocoa and curled up into the vacant couch. She nursed the cup for a time, staring down into the floor in front of her, forgetting about the job she was supposed to be doing at the time… until a certain person reminded her of that duty.

"Aren't we supposed to be working right now Ms. Romanova?"

The voice brought Nene back to reality instantly as she looked up into the mischievous eyes of Leon. "Wha… Oh Leon-poo… it's just you. Don't scare me like that! I thought it was the section chief or something!"

"If you don't stop calling me that, I'll tell him just where you've been for the last thirty minutes."

"You wouldn't… THIRTY minutes?" she exclaimed. "I haven't been here that long, have I?"

"I passed by here a half hour ago and noticed you there. Your cup's not as full now and you haven't moved otherwise, have you?"

Nene bowed her head, acknowledging the verbal reprimand from her co-worker. "I've just got a lot on my mind, that's all," the dispatcher tried to explain.

"It's not about Priss is it?"

Not exactly. Nene couldn't answer out loud because there was too much running through her head to sort out what Leon should know and what he couldn't. Add to that fact that Nene still hadn't heard anything from Priss directly and she just didn't know what to tell the inquisitive man in front of her.

"Well?"

"I still haven't heard from her if that's what you're asking."

"Aren't you worried about her?"

"Yes…" Nene answered quickly before indecision halted her train of though once more.

"I've heard that Sekiria has a show tonight… think she'll show up?" Leon asked, verbally circling around the topic he wanted to bring up.

"I don't know. If I knew more about what was going on with her, then maybe I'd have a better feel for whether she'll be there or not. She never misses a show on purpose though…"

"Really? I'd heard rumors she ditched quite a few for no apparent reason… You wouldn't happen to know what those reasons were, would you?"

"Um… No… I mean, I'm sure they were perfectly understandable reasons at the time…"

"Speaking of reasons…" Leon said getting back to the point that was really bugging him, "… what was the reason you were looking up files on someone named Linna the other day?"

Nene flinched at the sore spot she was still smarting from in her mind before answering quickly with the story she had fabricated at the time. "The chief asked me to check on some files for him… I couldn't find them though."

"Really," the ADP officer replied unconvinced of the truth of the last statement. "That person wouldn't have been named Linna Yamazaki, would it?"

Uh Oh. "Um, actually I don't remember…"

Leon leaned in close with a scowl forming on his face. "Come on Nene, cut the crap. I know Linna was friends with Priss… and you are friends with Priss… so just level with me, OK?"

"Wha… How did you…" Nene stammered as she leaned as far back into the cushion of the couch and away from Leon as she could.

Leon stood back up as he explained. "A friend of Daily's overheard some conversations about that boomer incident around Hugh Geit a few days ago. When we checked it out, we found out that someone named Linna Yamazaki was hurt in that incident and transported to Kanto Memorial. When we started questioning the staff, a couple of them also mentioned a certain person by the name of Priscilla Yamazaki. Turns out that Priscilla Yamazaki was none other than Priss, who was pretty upset about Linna's injuries for some reason. My guess is she is either related to Linna somehow, or they are just good friends." Leon's tone took a very accusatory tone with the next question he asked. "So what can you add to the story… since the chief didn't recall asking you to look up any files on anyone named Linna."

Nene's face was stone frozen in shock. She couldn't begin to think about how to talk her way out of this situation. At least he didn't ask about the fake pass…

"While you're thinking about that, I don't suppose you'd know how to forge a hospital pass would you? I was pretty surprised to find the doctor so convinced that the name he saw on Priss' badge read Yamazaki and not Asagiri," he said with a growing smirk across his lips. Leon was immensely enjoying this torture.

Nene's face wasn't frozen anymore… her eyes widened out even more, eyebrows beginning to twitch. She stared at the floor, unable to look the larger ADP officer in the eye anymore. It can't get any worse… maybe I'll only be in jail until I'm fifty…

Leon realized he wasn't going to get any answers if he kept up the pressure this way. He turned his head towards the wall as he tried to lower the tension level in the break room a bit. "Daily thought I was crazy, you know. We started out looking for clues on the Knight Sabers and wound up finding Priss instead."

Luckily for Nene, Leon was too self-absorbed at the moment to notice she had nearly choked on her own tongue, gulping hard at the mention of the Knight Sabers.

"He thought I was having some delusional fantasy… thinking Priss was really the Blue Saber since that one had saved my ass a couple of times in the last month. Guess he's right about that… if Priss was really that blue one, I'd be dead right now anyway."

"Ha… right… that's ridiculous Leon-poo. Priss… a Knight Saber," she fake laughed hard enough to convince the already smarting Leon, who was still recalling Daily's own laughing fit at his expense.

His normally calm and cool partner had lost it when Leon had informed him that their 'lead' at the hospital turned out to be a Hugh Geit employee who just happened to be a friend of Priss.

"You even have her picture in your wallet?" Daily had mocked him at the time, when Leon had shown him just how he had found out the truth.

"Is that a crime?"

"Not unless you start following her down dark alleyways or something," Daily had said jokingly, not realizing how close to home that hit.

Leon scratched the back of his head at the memory of the painful jab, turning back towards the loosened up ADP dispatcher and recalling his earlier question. "So, what can you add that I don't already know Ms. Romanova?"

Nene decided to stick to the story and not divulge any more than she had to, Leon was already way to close to the truth than she wanted. "If I do tell you what I know, do you promise to forget the fake pass?"

Leon smiled, as his bargaining chip seemed to pay off. "Alright. But if I find out you're still hiding something from me…"

Nene hid her concerns behind a smile of her own. "I promise to tell you what I know…" she said with one hand behind her back… two shaking fingers crossed both for the truth she had to hide as well as for luck that Leon wouldn't discover the lies.


Priss slumped back into the chair of her dressing room completely drained of whatever energy she had left. Even with shortening the set by a few songs, she barely had enough strength to keep going. The singer had even resorted to using a stool to sit on at one point. As bad as it must have looked on stage, Priss knew her voice must have sounded worse.

Even with the mystery treatment that had the rest of the band shaking their heads at the miraculous recovery, it still hadn't been enough to completely cure the ills. Just a temporary fix, she had acknowledged to herself when the pain returned during pre-show rehearsals. She had tried to take it easy all day, but found that she still couldn't stop singing. She didn't force the band to join in… but they had anyway. "…to Hell and back…" She knew they were sore from the abusing sessions of the day before, but they stayed by her side, supporting her in the only way they knew how. It had helped… maybe not quite enough, but it was still something.

The show provided another side benefit. Priss became so focused on not disappointing her bandmates, that she had temporarily forgotten her past problems with the Knight Sabers and Linna. The beginnings of closure had revealed themselves through the performance as the singer had left everything she had on stage.

After a few more minutes of rest, Priss dragged herself up and out to her waiting bike… the upcoming drive home looking more like a trip to China rather than the few kilometers it actually was. She mounted the bike and reached for her helmet… until an unwelcome voice broke into her routine.

"Are you sure you're going to make it home like that?"

Priss didn't look back at Leon. She picked up her helmet and prepared to put it on, feigning ignorance over her overzealous 'fan'.

"Look, I know what it's like to have a friend hurt by one of those monsters out there."

The helmet stopped its rise as the meaning of Leon's words began to play in Priss' mind. Still astride her bike, she put the helmet back down and turned her head towards the tall man still standing in the shadows. "What?"

"I know this sounds like snooping, but I found out about you visiting Linna Yamazaki at the hospital the other day. The doctor probably wouldn't have remembered you except for the few missing teeth his co-worker has now. Anyway, seeing you like this… I know it can be hard…"

"You don't know shit!" Priss yelled out, voice cracking and straining audibly from the effort, dismounting and facing the startled ADP officer.

"Maybe I don't. But I've had more than my fair share of friends get hurt or worse by boomers…" Leon wasn't quite done talking, but he had to stop since Priss had jumped at him with strength he didn't think she had left in her.

"It wasn't the goddamn Boomer!" the crazed woman screamed as she charged forward, knocking the bigger man to the ground with a shoulder to his chest. Standing over him with her right fist raised up ready to pound away at any moment. The returning pain in her throat caused her to stop as Priss realized just how close she was to losing it completely.

Leon couldn't move. It wasn't Priss' weight or positioning that was pinning him down… it was the silhouette of her form against the false-lit sky above. The outline was frighteningly familiar, freezing his body to the ground.

Priss face sank from fury to exhaustion, right hand dropped to her throat, trying to sooth the burning vocal cords inside. She turned away from the fallen man and trudged back to her bike. The singer mounted the red machine, donned her helmet, and drove off into the night, leaving the very shaken Leon in her wake.

After a few minutes of retrospection, he stood up and brushed himself off. Looking down the now empty alleyway, he mentally recalled the image forever burned in his memory now. The berserker like rage in Priss' eyes, fist drawn up to strike down into the heart of her enemy… there was no mistaking the resemblance anymore in his mind.

Leon superimposed a mental image of the Blue Saber over the top of Priss' enraged form… it was a perfect fit. "Maybe I am crazy," he told the shadows. With no real proof, all Leon had to go on was his suspicions. The last words from Priss played in his mind though "It wasn't the goddamn Boomer!"… just what did she mean by that? Those thoughts intermixed with those of this Linna person, and Nene as well. Just how much of her story was he to believe now?

Leon walked over to his bike, parked a few blocks down from the club. He had some serious questions to answer in his mind. How far would he go to find the truth? If he did find proof, what to do with it? More importantly, what were his real motivations right now, considering the woman he had in his sights was also a wanted vigilante… or at least used to be until a few nights ago. Somehow he had to find out what happened that night. But, after carefully considering the normal avenues of assistance he utilized… Leon decided he was going to have to find out on his own.

To be continued…