On Brenda's cue Ni'ka placed the thorn on her fingertip right so that Putin could see it, letting a bit of the venom drip out. "It Changes people," she explained. "If they're strong enough to survive the pain, of course. The others just feel the pain and then die." It was more than that, of course, but the little guy in front of her didn't need to know that. "Would you be strong enough?" Her tone clearly showed that she didn't think so.

If the Russian dictator had been angered by the failure of his security, having anyone doubt his strength angered him even more so. "You..." he started to protest and get up from his seat, but faltered again when Rick stepped up, drawing his knife. It was Na'vi-made, a common hunting dagger for the average Na'vi; in Rick's hands it looked like a rather wicked shortsword.

"You," he picked up Putin's words, "you have so much blood on your hands, so much suffering, that the RDA looks almost innocent in comparison, at least where Earth is concerned. This little toy here might not have venom or neurotoxin on its blade, but it can deal out pain and kill just the same, and I know how to use it. It's time to give back to you some of what you've handed out so freely to others."

Putin swallowed and sat back in his overstuffed chair. Slowly it began to dawn to him that these savages in front of him - he included the soldier too - wouldn't show any mercy and he was powerless in their hands. A feeling he had liked when his opponents and enemies felt it, not so much for himself. Actually he didn't like it at all. And with that feeling of helplessness came another one: fear!

OOC: Somebody has to play Putin...  *sigh*  ;-b

Through all of this, the Russian leader only sat there impassively, occasionally blinking.  In that moment, he reminded Enya, the youngest member of the party, of Jabba the Hutt; only she and Tali, of all those born on Pandora, could have known anything about Star Wars.

She barely stifled a giggle.  But she knew if she was heard before she was seen, the Na'vi woman behind her would probably be displeased; and if there was one thing Enya did not want, it was to be in "biiiiig trouble" with her adoptive mother.  For now, she would let the grown-ups do the talking!

Brenda resumed her pacing.  "Yeah, I remember you.  You and the RDA have been giving me fits for years - the RDA mostly, but you first.  I've already wrecked the RDA.  Your turn."

Putin's brow creased.  ~ *Wrecked* the RDA? ~ he thought.  ~ When and how did anyone "wreck" the RDA? ~  Then he thought about some things...and other things...and why his pet billionaires had been making noises about someone else perhaps being better-suited to restore the Russian Empire than himself...  "A noble idea," they'd said once, "but perhaps one for more vigorous spirits."  None of those men had lived another week...so why did their words still trouble him?

Brenda cut back in.  "Yeah, mister, you've got problems.  Hell, I've got problems!  Problems the size of swallowed nations.  Remember Armenia? --Yeah, well, Armenia remembers YOU."

Then, faster than anyone could really process the movement, she whipped out the longest damned bow anyone on Earth had ever seen and nocked an arrow.  "Naahh, you don't need to worry about me," she disclaimed.  "This is a ranged weapon, totally unsuitable for a conference room, at least one smaller than a football field.  I'm just cover.  Your real troubles are about to begin."

There were some things about which no one could disguise their fear.  Like most strongmen, Vladimir Putin was a coward at heart.  Destroy half a continent though he might, he could not abide the idea of getting hurt himself.  But one kind of hurt was crouched right in front of him, sharp and black; and one was moving about the room as if in search of the best line-of-sight for a bowshot, despite what she'd said about deploying her weapon here.  And as for the American soldier...what the hell was he up to, anyway?

For the first time, Putin actually felt a little uneasy.

"Oh, by the way," said Brenda, "Ni'ka's claw has poison in it, and you probably won't enjoy the neurotoxins I'm packing either."

Putin had poisoned so many, or had them poisoned.  Poison all around him now, and no one was here to keep him from meeting the same fate...  Why was that?  How had half an army of security people not already barged in here and thrown the barbarians out??  The flash of anger was more familiar; it made a good fallback option, vastly preferable to letting his inner terror become obvious.

"Yeah, if he wanted to look like a soldier - major fail. More like a boot camp dropout..." Rick, the third Changed one in the little group and the only one who had started out as a human, melted out of the shadows too now. If Brenda moved like a panther, his movements reminded more of the wolves that hunted in cold Siberian nights, as he marched straight up to the Russian president, towering over the man, eyes like steel.

"And they call me a traitor to the human race," he muttered. The expression that then appeared on his face was definitely wolfish too. "Wasn't that what you always feared? Some 'merican soldier here, right on your doorstep, in front of you? Well, we can make your nightmares come true now. And a few you didn't think of yet."

OOC:  Introducing...Enyafam.  ^_^

  - Enya: DtP/Passages
  - Brenda: DtP/Passages
  - Tali: Passages, a few years older
  - 'Iheyu: DtP
  - Tangek: DtP

And you're kinda-sorta gonna see someone from Borderlands too.  ;-)

Now: As you might have noticed, our tale opens with a colossal feat of in medias res - that's when the reader just sort of gets dropped right into the middle of everything with neither prelude nor exposition or even a flashback.  Here we find our characters  already in the Kremlin, in Putin's conference room no less, and indeed crowding around his end of that social-distancing table.  How the--??  Well, there's a crane over there if you need to suspend some disbelief; I know we're asking a lot of you here.  That should get you up the first ten storeys or so; if you're still incredulous after that, you're on your own.  ;-)

  ~~~~~

Brenda Mooradian emerged from shadows that were only a shade darker than her Changed hunting companion; she herself, an "integrated" Avatar, was only a shade lighter.

"Hey...remember me?" she sneered at the human.  "'Cause I remember you..."

She eased her way down from the rafters slowly, slinky as a black panther and just as menacing.  She prowled the length of the five-times-Covid-proof conference table, up and down once...twice, inwardly pleased at the way the man flinched the first time she drew close.  She'd heard he was sick; she'd heard he was crazed; she didn't care.  What mattered was that this man was trying to restore an empire that had long ago collapsed in on itself, its people unable to bear the weight and cost of its military aggression towards the nations it liked to "annex".

"Still going for the shirtless look, I see..." she drawled as she halted about halfway between Vladimir Putin and the end of the table.  "Think that makes you a stud?  All it does for me is tell me how far you've let yourself go."  The look she gave the President of the Russian Federation was anything but friendly...or diplomatic.  Diplomacy had never been her strong suit...

<tag!>

So - here we go 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ni'ka eyed the pale, slightly pudgy human, dressed in something she recognized as what tawtute warriors wore - at least on his lower half. His upper half was bare and showed clearly that his days as a warrior were already long gone. She made a disgusted sound in the back of her throat - how someone so pitiful could cause so much destruction and pain!

All of a sudden she lunged forward to hiss in his face. "Skxawng!"  Then she leaned back again and grinned, making sure to show as much fang as possible, enjoying the fear in his face as she somehow not only managed to change the colour of her eyes to the shining red of the Vrrtep-possesed while she slowly willed the thorn out of her fingertip, her blazing gaze never leaving the dictator's face.

Her other hand gestured towards the small group of family that had come along to give a Russian dictator and warmonger the medicine he deserved. "Your turn - for now."

OOC: A little humor.

...Let the Games Begin!!   |:-]

That sub-plot's gonna go here.  (:-)

OOC:  Welcome to our little revenge wish-fulfillment fantasy!

This started out as Kiye and I were thinking Bad Thoughts--some sad, some angry, some distressed--about the Russians' unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.  Both of us are children of the Cold War, and I'm ex-military; I served precisely to keep exactly this kind of thing from happening, yet here we are and, forty years later, I'm too banged-up to do anything about it.

Except write.  Writing can be very therapeutic; at the very least. it gives the Bad Thinking somewhere to go besides being locked up in our heads making us feel even more helpless.  What comes out of a writing-therapy session is generally not suitable for publication; but the delicious thought of us or our proxies (our characters) kicking Putin's ass back to his mama's womb has been getting its exercise through private e-mails for the last month or so.  Eventually I even came up with an idea for a subplot; at that point we decided that the thing has gotten too big for a non-threaded format, so I made a little spot for it and here we are.   ;-)

Credit: Kiye started the story itself.  Thank you, Kiye!   \o/

"Okay, no arguing the martyr complex then - I wouldn't lie to you anyway", Rick stated, then took some time to make it through everything else Ash had just said. "First of all - don't feel guilty about 'Iheyu having to hide the whole thing from her family. Yeah, that sucked and my heart hurt for her, but as you said: it was her own idea, she's an adult and can make her own decisions. Maybe you coming along wasn't the best idea in the end, but nobody could know before." He paused. "Not that I'm not more than glad that this is finally out in the open - we got too much secrets going on lately and they hurt too many people."

"I'd be a lot more alarmed about Seze's eyes turning red if you hadn't told me before that it's an emotional thing and that it can be stopped by a lullaby. Gonna have to trust Ngatapa on this one. Although it spilling over to Seze ain't the best news of the day." He sighed. "Guess we're all coming out of it scarred one way or the other, even the innocent ones who deserve it least."

"But I dunno about that stuff of you not having had the chance to be a child", he finally mused. "Yeah, your childhood was crappy, for your illness and everything else that came out of that. No discussion here. But you've still been a child - being a child comes in many flavours after all - and what happened back then made you into the adult you are right now. With all the pros and cons. Yeah, you tend to obsess over things, but that also makes you strong and strong-willed. You grew up alone and that makes you wanna take on everything alone, even when there are others around who'd share the load with you." He raised a brow. "Guess that's where that martyr complex comes into play again... So, you learning to let go, play, rely on others - I'm totally on the Tsahiks' page here."

He caught Ash's eyes now. "You know I love you - and it hurts like hell watching you trying to fight out everything on your own, keeping the rest ouf us out, but I also know where it's coming from. That isolated childhood you were just talking about - relying on your own, it's a survival strategy for you. And doing instead of thinking -  been there, done that. Heck, why do you think I came to Pandora in the first place after Cathy's death? To keep me from thinking - I wasn't doing, I was running." He smiled now, even if it was a bit crooked. "So maybe it's not as much about being a child, it's about learning to let go. To face the things we've been through, accept them in some way, grief for what couldn't be - and then open up for something new. And, yeah, to have fun. I just told Brenda that it's something we forgot about lately - we were so busy with doing, as you say, that we forgot about actually living. But we might have a breather here and get a chance to actually use it for something else than pure survival."

"Well..." Ash began, facing Rick again.  "It was...strange...  The whole thing, I mean.  The meeting...  When we got there, some of the Tsahiks were already making comments about why should a tawtute be involved in this at all, and if one had to be, why did it have to be me?  ...Rick, Ni'ka had to talk me into going into that chamber.  Fortunately, Ali'ite was not one of the doubtful ones, or I think I'd've found a way to disappear into the woodwork...

"So, much to my unpleasant surprise, we hardly talked about the mission at all.  We spent almost all morning talking about me.  And a lot of things they said hit home...  And a lot of what I said back probably sounded like excuses...  And I got upset, and Seze's eyes turned red, and that all by itself almost undid me - Rick, I thought in another body I'd be safe from that!  But Ali'ite sorted me out, and they all decided - myself included - that they should never have asked this of me, because I was a child in all the ways that hurt the mission most, and I know nothing about being a child because I was sickly and sheltered growing up, and anyway it was your job and I just came along to make sure you didn't face it alone.  'Iheyu's idea, and because of it she's had to keep secrets from her family...her children...her mate..."

She seemed on the verge of another bout of self-hatred; her eyes even started to tear up...but then, in the awkward duality she was living in now, she smiled a little and said "But it was a good thing to realise that about myself.  I'd never really considered how much my illness affected the person I became.  I was too busy doing so I wouldn't have to think.  But now that I've been discussed, I kind of feel sad for young me, and relieved that she's getting another chance.  It's helping me a lot with forgiving myself.  No, I haven't beat the martyr complex - I have one, you know it, but you're too sweet to say so - but at least now I know where the handle is."