Truth, Justice, And the FUN Way

All that Sheri had wanted to do was get back to her hotel and sleep off the truly vicious hangover that was, even now, working its way through her system. Turns out that she'd completely lost her ability to handle alcohol. She should probably have kept in the habit whilst she was in the Wastes. Then again, if she'd done that, she'd probably be dead. Not that she was entirely convinced that being dead wouldn't be an improvement to her current state.

Then she'd rounded a corner in time to see a car crumple against an enormous Saiyan.

Only, she's obviously not just a Saiyan. Sheri knows Saiyans, and she knows they don't usually come with orange hair, even when they are as big as that. She flinched at the sound of the impact, and the following, inevitable, detonation. The sheared metal spat sparks and even more noise as ruined vehicles carved deep furrows into the asphalt. 

She hated everything about this.

But at least she had her rifle this time around.

Her head ached too much to even have a hope of being at her best. All she wanted to do, honestly, was curl up in the corner and vomit. But her gun settled easily into her hands and she knelt down, assuming a firing position as she scoped down the two combatants.

Every instinct that she had told her that she should shoot the Saiyan, now, in the back, whilst she was distracted. But she fought those instincts down. Even more pale than she normally was, sweating profusely in battle for the first time in years, Sheri did her best to try and stay true to the first rule of Tuffle warfare:

Intelligence. First.

It was difficult to jump to conclusions, but the Saiyan wasn't the one throwing vehicles around. The robot seemed to be showing more disregard for property damage in a built up urban area. Did that mean the robot had begun this? Or did it just mean that the robot was desperate and the Saiyan needed to be brought down at all costs?

Her power level plunged significantly as she got her breathing under control. She just needed a sign. Some confirmation which side was the aggressor.

Though her sights remained locked firmly onto Azuki's back...

... it'd be so easy to take the shot and rid the universe of one more dangerous Saiyan, wouldn't it?

(Wordcount: 400 / Powerlevel 6000 (Suppressed to 5) / KP: 6/6 / MP: 1/6)

Just breathe, Sheri.

This isn't really her fight. That's the thought that keeps intruding into her head. Whatever was going on here, she could quite legitimately just leave it for the locals to deal with. Whether it was a Saiyan rampaging through their city or a science experiment gone wrong, she was a tourist. She was supposed to be here relaxing. She'd done a piss-poor job of doing that so far, but that didn't mean it was any more her duty to intervene and risk her neck for theirs, did it?

But she could see the way Azuki was fighting. Charging in and letting herself get caught like that. The Saiyan was relying wholly on her brute force to see her through. And the more she watched the battle, the more she was forced towards a set of conclusions.

The first was that this robot was the aggressor; as unbelievable and unlikely as it seemed to her, there was no other way to explain the cavalier approach to property damage.

The second was that the robot was almost certainly leading the enormous Saiyan towards some sort of trap.

After all, that's what she'd do.

It was a technique she'd used countless times. Get the strongest lone Saiyan. Make them feel like they had something to prove. Get them to focus on, well, mostly on her. And rely on her team to take them out when she had lured them into an advantageous position.

Sweat trickled down Sheri's neck and it had nothing to do with the booze she'd drunk the night before. Was she really about to do this? Step in on behalf of a Saiyan of all things. She felt sick.

"... just one more thing I can never tell Command about ..."

All at once, she was moving into action. Releasing her power so that she could move with the speed she needed, the soldier ran straight up the wall of the building she had been scoping the combat out from, then slid along the roof, sighting down her rifle as she went.

Suki's head fit neatly between the crosshairs...

And then she kept sighting, and a burst of ki-empowered laserfire streaked from the rooftop. Bright red lances of it scattering not across the robot, but the roadway directly in front of the lurching metal monstrosity. If her hunch was right, the best thing she could do was work to keep the machine pinned and in place - let the Saiyan do the punching.

(Wordcount: 413/817)

If the machine had released the same kind of attack that the Saiyan had taken head on against her, she'd now be dead.

The realisation hit Sheri hard. She didn't need a scouter to tell that this thing was far above her level. The speed with which the casual 'covering fire' was blasted back in her direction told her that. It cut through the cover she'd taken as though it were nothing, and the remaining force was still enough to lift her bodily from her feet and have her rolling back along the roof, her 'I <3 West City' shirt set alight as she came to a stop.

Oh, here came her breakfast.

And last night's booze.

Mopping at her lips with the back of her hand, she tried to ignore the pain now coursing through her. Even if she were at her best, she wouldn't fancy her chances here. She needed her team backing her up. But a Saiyan was worth three of them, as a general rule.

Sheri kept her head down as much as she could. This was madness. It wasn't her fight. Now that the double vision was clearing up and the adrenalin was helping to throw back some of the worst hangover symptoms, she was pretty sure the robot was making off with some sort of vault. Was she really risking her life for something as pathetic as someone else's money? She didn't care about her own money, let alone theirs.

When she made it back to the edge of the roof and saw the Saiyan standing over the collapsed machine, there was a wave of relief. Her instinct had been right. And with the circuitry exposed, she lifted her rifle for a second time, sighting down the barrel and looking for what she was sure was there...

She squeezed the trigger, and a second volley of bright red light lanced out from her position, melting one particular chip amongst the heap to scrap.

And after she did that, she shakily began to descend from the rooftop, at a far less frantic pace. "Have to take out the self-repair systems in designs like this." She mumbled as she got closer; apparently believing that she'd done just that. "If you don't know what you're looking for, internal heat is better than blunt force trauma. S'why we don't use that type of design much." Saiyans didn't often target specific parts of machines... but blow the entire thing up from the inside out? Yeah, they were good at that.

(Wordcount: 421 / 1238)

Sheri is actually looking wilder than she normally did. In the attempt to try and 'relax' and actually make progress towards becoming a recovered soldier again, Sheri had bought touristy clothes. A loose 'I <3 East City' tee, now burned and charred down one side and revealing the heavy scars beneath. A pair of sunglasses. Lime green shorts. Flip-flops. But the entire outfit also criss-crossed with dozens of pouches. The Tuffle definitely cut a strange looking figure even before factoring in that she was toting her rifle around with her.

And her attitude did not at all fit to the outfit she had chosen. That outfit said 'I am a tourist out for a good time'. The attitude, though, was dour. Her expression set and serious as she slung the rifle, nearly as big as she was, back across her shoulders. 

Reaching into one of the many pockets, she pulled out an antiseptic spray, and squirted it over the burn wound she'd taken. Now that the adrenalin was dying down she could feel the crash approaching; she had been in a bad way even before she'd blundered into this fight. But the wound wasn't lethal. Pain was just pain. She'd push through it. Maybe it'd give her something to focus on other than the crushing sense of purposelessness that was lurking at the edge of her awareness every moment she spent on this backwater planet.

"No."

Sheri was almost inclined to leave it there at first - just walk away. This isn't any of her business. The last thing she needed in her life was more Saiyans. But. Something that the hybrid said got through that stubborn wall of standoffishness.

She'd called her Lady. Not kid. Not girl. Lady.

"I'm just a soldier. I've seen things like this before. Years ago." She kicked the hunk of metal, assessing the heavy thud of her foot against the metal. Tough stuff. She doubted that her rifle would have posed a significant threat to it; which implied something very interesting.

"Don't think this was AI." She said, "If it was spooked by my fire, that implies it's either very basic, or more likely... remote controlled. You know who sent it or where they might be?"

(Wordcount: 371/1609)

"I've had worse."

Sheri probably didn't mean for that to sound as terse as it did, but it's difficult. Standing this close to the enormous Saiyan hybrid, her every instinct told her that she was going to be attacked any second; that she needed to flee, run, hide. Gather support. Fight back. Kill this girl.

It's a challenging set of emotions to fight down. She doesn't want to feel this way. The more Suki talked, the more obvious it was that she wasn't the bad guy here. It made her feel bad for letting the crosshairs hover over the Saiyan's back. She'd come within inches of falling down on the other side of this conflict, purely out of prejudice. But it wasn't Suki's fault that her blood had been engaged in brutal conflict for decades on a planet half the galaxy away.

"That's Saiyans for you." She said, shaking her head slowly, "It's... probably not your fault. Not really. When you're so damn strong, it must be difficult to feel all that concerned. But you should try and be careful. It's true that you'll be tough enough to shrug it off ninety nine times out of one hundred, but that one time you aren't..."

Why is she even saying this? Giving advice to someone who might well turn out to be on the other side of the battlefield from her one of these days. Sheri reached up and pinched the bridge of her nose, exhaling hard as she tried to calm herself down.

Even as they conducted the conversation, though, Sheri was reaching into her pockets, producing bandages to tie around her wound. "I can take care of my own injury." She said, knowing for a fact that after her interaction with the medical professionals on this planet, she trusted her own expertise more than that of anyone else. "But if you've got someone who knows tech, it might be worth trying to get this scrap to them. If I had a few hours I might be able to find broadcast equipment in there, but I don't have any way to track it back to the source, and I don't like the idea of someone out there knowing I helped stop ... whatever this was."

She was glad to have the excuse to look back at the robot at least. It was easier to talk to Suki when she didn't have to look at her Saiyan face. And it was true, too. Whether it was her fight before or not, it definitely was now; the last thing she needed was one of these robots hunting her down because she failed to take out its owner.

(Wordcount: 444/2053)

The hangover must really have been hanging around Sheri. Or maybe the pain from the injury was more distracting than she had thought. Because this was the second time that the Saiyan had mentioned the fact that she was involved with someone who was 'active service'. It wasn't certain that the individual was a parent, or a Saiyan even if they were because clearly there's more than just Saiyan going on there, but it should have had her guard up much higher much sooner.

Sheri's jaw had clenched when the bone broke and was reset. Her expression became even darker as Suki kept talking, though. Had she done anything wrong? Well, she was existing in her presence. That was really it. And though it was awful to think that way... now there were even more reasons ot think that it might be enough.

"You're fine." She said, entirely unconvincingly, as she tied the bandages tighter and then off, tucking the remaining roll back into her pocket.

Rolling her shoulder, she winced, and went for a second pocket - a couple of pills that she gulped down dry, and then she cracked her neck, craning it and forcing herself to look back up at the much, much taller woman.

"I'm a Tuffle, kid. Like you said. You're a local. But I've been killing people who look like you for the best part of two decades. And people who look like you have killed, a lot of my friends."

And that was really it. She could try and push that down as much as she liked. Intellectually, this teenager was more or less everything Sheri could hope for; a Saiyan dedicated to using her strength to help her community. Even if there was more going on than the average Saiyan, whatever, that was still more or less the future she hoped for. One where Saiyans actually lived in peace with the others on their planet.

But feelings don't care about facts. And all Sheri could see when she looked at the monstrously powerful brute were the faces of dead friends. She could imagine all too well what it would be like to fight her. Everything about the younger woman's brutal form of combat was archetypically Saiyan; just plowing through her targets with brute force and bone-crushing strength. She'd seen it too many times to be able to put it out of her head.

"But those people aren't you. And it's my problem to get over. I'll try not to put it on you. So come on."

She nodded her head to the wreckage.

"If you want to thank me, you can carry that thing back to your tech wiz. Let's see if we've got anyone else out there to worry about."

She just had to keep reminding herself, the war wasn't here. It isn't on this planet. Even if this Tsuna was ex-Saiyan military, they had to have left Plant for a reason. Hopefully they wouldn't hold a grudge.

(Wordcount: 496 / 2549)

Sheri flinched when the girl tucked her tail away. That wasn't what she wanted to inflict on other people. She really did mean it when she said the problem was hers. This kid hadn't even been to Plant. She didn't believe that all Saiyans were evil. She didn't believe they were all irredeemable, either.

There were people she fought alongside - people she even considered friends - who did think that way, of course. But she saw it for what it was. A defense mechanism. She'd killed enough Saiyans to know that at the end... they were just like everyone else. They had regrets. They had fears. Some held on to their stubborn pride. But when the end finally came, nobody faced it with anyone else. Everyone faced it alone. And nobody who died on those blood-drenched battlefields was ready when their heart stopped beating.

"The Saiyans invaded Plant." She said, because not at least asserting that much would feel like an unforgivable betrayal. "Maybe one day they'll kill us all. Maybe we'll kill them. I hope our leaders can figure out an alternative, because..."

Even saying this much was, hard. Why were there tears welling up in her eyes?

"... I'm so tired."

The idea that she might be considered 'cool'? That... that was completely alien to Sheri. Moreso, perhaps, than the idea that a Saiyan could be a good person. She wasn't someone to admire. She was just a soldier. Still. It was nice to hear.

She blinked away the tears, swallowing that emotion back down and locking it away tight. Better to just repress all that for now. She could think about her emotions more when she was dead.

"I can fly. I'm not that badly wounded."

Her teeth ground together, but the Tuffle lifted into the air after Azuki, her path a little less stable and she was - of course - slower if the warrior went all out, but she could keep a decent pace at least. Especially as she wasn't being burdened with any heavy objects.

(Wordcount: 337/2886)