'Nora' the Lilligant
The Gracedia Order
Lytala city, the Blood Pit Arena Stands
Affected RPers: @Death's Spook (definitely directly), possibly others. (I bolded what I did for a good reason... I think.)


Nora's eyes gazed upon the battle unfolding. The Steel Scavengers were exploiting field effects as the Grand Lady took her first kill-and at that moment Nora's memory clicked into place like ball bearings. Oh good alph. That Lady. And that would mean the Mimikyu in the stands would be that Carpenter-Weaver. The less they knew of Petrox, the better. Sadly, or maybe not so sadly for Nora, almost immediately succeeding their first kill two of their own was detonated by a landmine.

The Gracedia Order was moving in on the Black Lotus, themselves moving in onto the Sentinel Corporation team-and as first blood between Athena and Pheobe started being exchanged, as a bullet came straight through Perceval's head and eliminating him, and another Gracedia Order fellow got killed by more sudden landmines-wait.

Nora's mind buzzed-a contradiction in some earlier factoid. Something was not entirely right with that. That Gracedia Order guy-the Axiom fellow-he was... Wasn't he? No, he was-he hadn't stepped on there and immediately caused the explosion. He was holed up there for a good while doing some on-point havoc. If it was a legitimate landmine, that wouldn't have happened-it would have detonated the instant he stepped onto it, not later, right? Nora didn't think most landmines were wired up to a timer-no, no, definitely not. Traps started instantly when the game went on. Nora knew from a random factoid she picked up-and as far as Nora was concerned, a part of spywork was coalescing random factoids into actual concrete facts. In this case... There was a record for the fastest death in the arena-2 seconds in to a booby trapped cache, wired up to-you guessed it-a landmine.

Nora soundly concluded that the odds of that being a landmine-as opposed to, say, a remotely detonated explosive-were near to zero.

She wasn't the only one. Any idiot with a brain that had actually been watching would realize that was unlikely to be a landmine, at least in that one instance. Shame that the whole crowd were bloody zombies for how much they thought, though! If anyone noticed, they didn't comment-which was smart. Not yet would they speak of it, but the information had been brought to the table, and anyone who connected the dots and watched the footage over would realize there was an error in events. An unlikely thing. Doubtless all three of the major rebellion factions, and soon everyone that wasn't sticking their heads up their own hinds (or perhaps their ruts) for the Black Lotus, would realize that the death of that poor Axiom chap was not to a landmine. There had always been things like that before-there was yet another, though this was perhaps one of the most blatant yet. Nora hadn't been paying too much attention to the other factions-she had low hopes to the Steel Scavengers high-armor playstyle. She wasn't tough enough to emulate it either way, not strong enough to heave the armor around herself. Perhaps the 'landmine' that killed two of them was likewise not a landmine at all.

"Whoever detonated that bomb was out of a job," Nora snidely thought to herself.

The closest people got to speaking of the event was no less than one of the Black Lotus goons behind her commenting on how he preferred the booby traps to not just be spewed about randomly-took away from the real action, like the Gracedia Order and Black Lotus Captains fighting it out in midair. Nora had to admit that was definitely the big thing going on right now. The other was the surprisingly lethal Prankster Platoon, as the Prankster Platoon, after an impressive showing of crippling the Thundercrash gang and annihilating the Shadow Mask group, were forced to back away with only two members left in the fight, the rest phasing through or dying beforehand. So that was that team entirely out of the running, with only one elimination on a four-man team, one of which appeared to be dead-on blind after a certain attack (and that wasn't the dead one). Nora made sure to recall that the Mismagius phased through the floor, and ergo could still be lurking about elsewhere-

-and was not too pleasantly surprised about suddenly being tapped in the back by a shadowy hand, roughly the same time a rather unusual Sharpedo was giving her some flirtatious looks. The Sharpedo was unusual because he was, as they used to say, a player of the game. And lurking dangerously close to her purse.

Nora shifted her purse to Yvonne's lap after a quick check of contents (nothing was stolen). It would take a stupider soul to steal her gun where it was holstered-she'd yell, and it was near to a constant in this world that beefy men weren't going to ignore a charming young lady screaming her head off right next to them. Yvonne's glance at the Sharpedo proved that no-one was confused (except the Rotom) about what was going on here. "Uh, what's happening, and who's he?" The Rotom said.

"Err, nothing, just a meeting with someone else..." Yvonne said as Nora nodded and walked off.

"Charming little fish, aren't we?" Nora said, taking a breath of the cigar. "And charming little handymon associate, from what I've heard," she adds, as an observation. though, Nora hardly heard the claw as much as felt it on her skin.

Once behind the stands and thoroughly in the shadows... "... Let's skip the pleasantries. I don't need to know every name to know who moves around here," Nora said. "I'm ready to do both kinds of dirty dancing, preferably the rough before the pleasurable, if you get what I mean," Nora added. Innuendo meets business talk-Nora knew that business came before pleasure, but both near to each other was just the jackpot. And spywork could be said to be a kind of dirty dancing...

Nora attempted to huff out a ring of cigar smoke. It didn't work out, of course, more like a crescent moon, but that was neither here nor there. Nora's senses trembled for additional presences. She expected the Mimikyu-perhaps it was the Mismagius, though, and she was overthinking it. But why would a Mismagius know Shadow Claw? Nora didn't know if they could even learn that. Maybe it was another type of Ghost-type? Nora was fairly sure it was a Mimikyu, though... Fairly sure.

Nora respected scientists for one reason; Science relied upon theory in much the manner of a spy. Nothing was straightforwards and a simple answer typically masked a more complicated situation, and everything, in a sense, was assumption. Spywork was merely more high-risk assumption.