Anna felt a lump growing right in her throat. She had already admired the spirit of the Ukrainian people, their strength, their will to come out of it all stronger, not willing to give up on anything. Seeing it personified here was something special. And still she couldn't help the sudden urge to pick that girl up, straighten her messy clothes, pick the straw out of her hair...

"They'll also have help from all over the world," Rick added to Anna's unspoken words. "They - and you - are not alone in this."

"Right here is good," said Mariupol, patting a spot on the table right next to hers.  "But maybe you want to help him sit up?  Be bad if he pass out and fall off before..."  Then she reconsidered.  "Na, maybe put him back in his favorite chair; plenty support there - maybe little too much."  She wrinkled her nose impishly.

Her assailant having been put (back) in his place, she regarded him with a sad, gentle smile that could almost have been disappointed mother-love.  "You been bad," she began, firming up that impression.  "Been very mean to me and my People.  You know what you did, not gotta talk about it all day.  Only this: You see me all messed up.  Is how you left me.  But you also see me young.  I reborn; I live; I always live as long as I stay in the hearts of my People.  They come back, they gonna make me all pretty again."

OOC: I'm fine with incorporating my posts there - it just keeps the flow

BIC:
If the two humans present - besides Putin - hadn't believed in ghosts and spirits one time in their lives, their time on Pandora had changed their approach on that completely. There was more to the universe than met the eye. Without even having to think about it Rick stepped back and Anna made room for the spirit of Mariupol on the table, sliding down and stepping back as well.

As a Na'vi Ni'ka knew very well about spirits of places. This girl didn't quite have the same presence as the Great Mother had, but it was clear as the sky above Moscow that day that this wasn't any ordinary girl from the moment she walked in. And the name confirmed it. Mariupol - everyone in their little group knew the name of that place, the horrible things that had happened there were part of why they were here after all.

She put her free hand on her heart, slightly bowing  her head in respect. "This is your fight more than ours," she said to the girl, "So now it's your turn to do and say what you came for." She sent a questioning look at the sitting girl. "Should I keep holding him up or do you want him on his rear?"

Ni'ka hoisting the Russian leader up by the scruff of the neck put him at just the right height for what happened next: Tali, wearing an impossibly touristy shirt and swim trunks, swung down from the rafters, yelled "COWABUNGA!!!!" as he let go of the comm wiring he rode in on, and slid down the length of the table, which was way too long for anything else but just right for "surfing".  He stuck one leg out and let his momentum do the rest of the work...and Vladimir Putin found himself on the receiving end of one helluva kick in the 'nads.

During his training with the KGB, Putin had learned how to deal with torture and pain, it had been one of the basics every agent had to deal with. But none of that training had him prepared for the pain inflicted by the fist of a Changed human, a Changed Na'vi's claws - and most of all not of being kicked in the family jewels by someone who - if he only knew - was considered a pre-teen on a faraway moon, but by all rights had the size and strength of a grown man. And a horrible fashion sense!

"..." The Russian leader opened his mouth, but nothing came out but a wheezing sound while his face turned into a sickly shade of green. "..."

"You wanted to say...?" Anna asked, her voice sweet as a sugar overdose.

OOC: I've incorporated your Putin-and-Anna post into this one of mine, thus saving us an exchange or two when we're only here twice a week.  If I shouldn't have done that, please rap my knuckles with Enya's staff and I'll fix it.

BIC:  The Russian leader was still swaying in Ni'ka's grip like a hard-hit punching bag when there came a soft knock on the door the "aliens" had come in through.  Brenda tensed, raising the bow.  But 'Iheyu, still hidden, shook her head.  Of all the Na'vi in the Tompa'tanhi Clan, very few could See as deeply even with the Bond as she could without it.  The healer wasn't psychic, nor could she see through walls.  But what she sensed outside felt a little like Enya; and her glance now said clearly: Let this one pass.

In walked a girl dressed in, if not exactly pinpoint Ukrainian, at least recogniseably Eastern European attire.  There was the embroidered tunic, its hem reaching to mid-thigh; a little vest over it; a sash at the waist, peasant trousers, and soft shoes that had nonetheless survived a lot of use.  All of it, and the girl herself, looked rather rumpled; there were even twigs sticking out of her hair and from under her blue-and-yellow chaplet, as if they'd tried to catch her and been caught instead.  Yet she didn't seem to be in any particular distress; she entered the room serenely, at almost a queenly pace, and her feet hardly made a sound as they brushed the marble floor.

At length she found a spot to her liking and perched herself on the conference table, looking up at Mr. Putin almost sweetly.  "Hi," she said, her voice childlike but strong.  "'Scuse my mess; was pretty when did set out...  Ahh, and also 'scuse that my Russian not so good, 'cause we got stuff to talk about...  Vladimir, yes? --I Mariupol."

Vladimir Putin's face went from greenish to very, very pale.  Apparently some part of him did believe in ghosts and spirits...

Rick raised a brow at the dictator. "Quaint, huh?" he asked; and the next thing in Putin's face wasn't an empty threat but a well-placed left hook. Just enough to rattle his brain and teeth solidly and kicking his chair over, making the man slide backwards. "It's just that simply killing you would be too easy - too fast", the former soldier added.

Ni'ka stepped forward, picking Putin up by the scrunch of his neck, using her nails just enough to leave a mark in the man's pale skin. "You'd like that, wouldn't you?" she asked. "It being over like that?"

By now Putin had regained his composure, at least outwardly.  If these strange beings (he counted the humans) had been going to variously knife, poison, or puncture him, they'd have surely done it by now instead of bloviating in superhero soliloquies.  If the situation were reversed, he'd have done the killing first and saved the speech for when he actually had something to brag about.  So far it looked like he had nothing worse to fear than a lot of yelling and threats.

He regarded Ni'ka and her thorn first. "Say, aren't you a little uncomfortable in that position by now?" he smirked.

To Rick and the newly-arrived Anna, one with a sense of honor and the other with religion, he only said "How quaint."

Wisely, he did not try to tweak Brenda.  He sensed indignation from the others, but the archer carried an aura of real, if reined-in, menace.


Enya, still hiding, wondered what she was supposed to do.  It wasn't in her to make threats or to harm anyone, the occasional crack-upside-the-head with her quarterstaff notwithstanding, but the warriors at the head of the conference table had the "weapons" part covered.  But what was supposed to happen here besides the part with the weapons?  And why had her mother brought her to see this?  She was the sort who would happily filch eggs from a bird's nest, but she couldn't have shot a Yerik and still been herself, no matter how much she enjoyed eating them.

She gave her Na'vi adoptive mother a questioning look.  "Sa'nok...why I here?"

'Iheyu answered with a soft smile.  "You're here to make a gentle thing happen," she explained.  "Gentleness follows you everywhere, and it might not have been able to get in here otherwise.  I hope Brenda's not too twitchy today, or she might skewer it before it's all the way through the door..."

OOC: Next - the OTHER Enya!  You know, the scruffy one.

"Eh, as if I didn't hear that," Txa'ren commented back. "Besides, the guy's got Brenda, Ni'ka and Rick in his face; I don't thing he'll notice much else..."

"Yeah, talking about invasions!" Down on the ground the redhead moving out from the shadows now was comparatively short, which she would have been even in purely human company. She made up for it with the anger radiating from her whole petite person as she now shook her finger in Putin's direction. "You're an expert on that, ain't you?" she shouted. "Only that you don't have the balls to call it what it is. 'Special military operation', my ass!" Anna jumped on the long table, careful to not block Brenda's line of sight. "I hope when you're in hell where you belong you'll feel the pain of every mother and father losing their children, of every kid losing their parents, of everyone losing a loved one. Every. Single. Moment. Of. Eternity."

Putin tried to collect that icy calm he was known for. "Hell?" he asked. "What a stupid concept. That's all you got to offer?" Growing up in the Soviet Union had put a damper on the deep religiosity the Russian people was known for, but still there was a tiny bit of his soul not as sure as he claimed to be, so there was some whistling in the dark wrapped up in his statement.

Anna's face got just as hard and fierce. "Well, we can start with that right here and now," she said.

Up in the air Txa'ren winced. "Add my mate to that," he muttered so low that he wasn't sure even Tali could hear it.

Vladimir Putin was not the sort of man who did anything in a hurry.  His patience had served him well in the KGB, the old Soviet Union's spy agency; and now, as then, he was not going to act in a situation until he was fairly certain what it was.  But there weren't too many analogues on Earth for what confronted him now...

"I'm being invaded by aliens," he murmured in spite of himself.

"Funny you should mention invasions," said Brenda coolly over her shoulder.

Then Txa'ren's voice came crackling over Tali's comm headset, the one he'd been given long before his war, when humans and Na'vi had been on friendlier terms.  "Txa'," he subvocalised, flexing the muscles in his larynx to produce words without voice, "you always *did* like to announce yourself... Good thing we're already here, meathead, or you'd've given us away!!"

... least of all Txa'ren himself. He *had* been fascinated by Rick's chopper, true, but that he and his trusted ikran Taw'itan now would play catch with the Russian airforce was something he would never have guessed back on that day. Well, at least that was what he had been doing in the past few weeks, together with a few Ukrainian pilots: making life for the Russians rather miserable. The charm of an ikran was that he didn't show up on Russian radar, making the pair the perfect bait - and of course there was always the element of confusion. Txa' couldn't remember how often he had heard the word "d...d...dragon!" lately, yelled with several shades of terror and fear. Txa' didn't mind putting fear in those hearts - in his eyes they weren't true warriors, attacking innocent people.

Currently the two were flying air defense over the Kremlin, dealing with whatever Moscow could still throw at them after Tali was done with their systems. He listened in to what was happening down there over their comms channel, grinning fiercely at everything his friends fired at the Russian dictator. "To Vrr'tep with that skxawng," he growled, for everybody to hear.

Brenda circled around behind Putin's chair, passing it and stationing herself in a corner before checking her line of sight again and nodding, satisfied.  She'd spoken truth; her weapon was not directed at the man but at the entrance on the other side of the room.  Where was his security, indeed?  But she was pretty sure Tangek and the others had taken care of that.  All the same, if anyone came in that way, they would likely find themselves skewered by a 12-foot arrow before they even got a chance to refill the dictator's tea.

She wasn't really expecting anyone, though.  Just a precaution, in case a few FSB agents hadn't gotten Tali's memo yet.

Tali and Txa'ren had to be the two most unlikely people on Earth for the roles they'd taken.  Tali, Enya's "big brother" though he was all of thirteen years old, was a scout.  Since human tech had been brought to Pandora, being a scout had also meant becoming a computer hacker.  Tali was the best "systems explorer" that distant moon had to offer, and he was enjoying butting keyboards against Earth-bound opponents like the amateurish Russian bot corps and the very capable FSB.

He'd never beat the Ukrainians, though.  That country's "IT Army" had been fully mobilised for the conflict, and they were tying so many knots in Russia's tail that the spy agencies just couldn't keep up with them - not when they also had to provide reports and analysis on everything else that was wrong with Russia's world, which was, basically, everything.

As for Txa'ren, one of the Ikran Peoples' most nimble fliers back home, no one on either world would believe where he was now...

<ping!>