[Nexus] Inside 44

[Mindfreak]

Westlanna promptly heads for the room that her pager sends her to. She may not have decided what to do about Dave yet, but she knows that they are actually helping people here, and she is not going to simply stop working when some poor kid is lying there in need of help.

Dave's Free Clinic
She'll see that Dave is trying to jumpstart his heart.
"C'mon kid! C'mon!"
Glancing at Wes he gives a sigh of relief.
"I need you to get the Defibilators! I'd grab them but I can't take a second away from this!"

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Spoiler

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[Clarissa's Showdown]

Yank! Yoinks! Augh! And all that jazz!

Dexterity Dave succeeds in critically impairing the monster who was chain-whipped by him! Down he goes, like a stubborn felled tree, toppling to the ground, his heavy armor dragging him closer and closer to the ground before he smashes against it with a resounding thud and acute clash.

He's temporarily immobilized. Mustn't have been expecting for Dave to get so bold and adaptive in his countering techniques.

The tumbling innocent man flying out of a window hits the ground hard as Dave neglects to intervene in any sort of daring attempt to rescue him! He shall now be referred to as flat man. Unless Dave intervenes just in the nick of time to slow his descent.

Luckily, his condition is much less severe than his name would suggest. He is chalk full of broken bones, but he is still somehow breathing.

The warrior Dave chucked his shurikans at doesn't even flinch as they ding against his armor. He's more than slightly preoccupied causing colossal amounts of collateral damage to the squalid structures lining the streets.

Clarissa, on the other hand, is quite miffed at Dave. Dave said some things which hurt her deep like nothing else could. Although she does a flawless job of covering up her emotions with dispassionate brutality, she's far beyond the point of tears by now. And she's burned the bridge leading back over the bottomless precipice.

She glares at Dave with a look that would freeze a lesser man in his tracks, were her eyes not so mournful. She's clearly irked with him for following her to this field of valor uninvited and entirely unwanted. Outwardly, she's scolding him for his inadmissible behavior. Inwardly, his poorly chosen words are searing through every fiber of her mind, charring her love of Dave and ushering in a period of numbness which will soon decay to a flurry of spirit-mauling affliction.

"Do you want to talk with me or do you want to"

Clarissa flexes her fingers in the universal symbol for air quotes.

"'talk' at me. Well, I think you should have no trouble spitting out your words in between spitting out your teeth, Mister Better-Than-Thou-Art."

"Let me guess, you are shockingly upset that I forcefully dumped you off of me to get far, far away from you. Is that it? Or maybe you are about to preach to me and chide me for, y'know, splitting a dude open in order to rid myself of you. Either way, I don't care. It is well within my rights to exact payment from your whole species for how they have made me suffer and bleed and worse over the span of several lifetimes. It is perfectly acceptable for me to spill their blood in exchange for all of the horrors they have subjected me to. You don't know my story, so you couldn't understand. Know that I wasn't exaggerating when I said that you were the first person to ever treat me with common decency in all of my combined lifetimes...or so you misled me to believe."

"I comprehend everything that you meant with those words you spoke. I'm not as dimwitted as you'd accredit to me! You really had me going there, but now I realize that the only reason you ever wanted to keep me around was because you wanted this. You wanted my body. You don't love me. You lust for me. And if you think otherwise, then I doubt you can differentiate between love and lust at your current level of maturity."

Feel the disdain, Dave!

Clarissa's Showdown
Dave sighed.
"Clarissa, what I said at AMEN wasn't directed at you. Not in the slightest."
"Why do I want to talk to you? I want to know what was so extrememly important that you decided to not care about the one thing I truly asked you to do for me. To not harm people in the Red Zone."
He steps forward, arms crossed.
"And I love you Clarissa. I abandoned my cushy job for you, even helped you escape...I even asked you to marry me! I've trusted you completely, even when you gave me that ring, even after you gave me that ring. I went against even the forces of Heaven to protect you. And no matter what form you take, you could be just a puddle of mush for all I care, I will still love you. And no matter what you do, or what you say, or what you choose to become, that will never change."
It's true. It's very hard for Dave to love someone, because of his ninja heritage that makes him wary. And having his previous girlfriends before Clarissa all be assassins doesn't help.
And this makes him pretty loyal.
But now, it's Dave's turn to be upset.
He turns away from her, hands shaking and tears starting to spring from his eyes.
"And for you to think that I'd ever do any of those things for some one out of lust..."
"And to yell at me because I don't know your story? How could I? You never talk about yourself until I need to know..."
His clones fade away to nothingness.
"When you calm down, and realize what you've said...come find me."
And then he teleports away to a mountain ridge.