A shockwave sweeps the room, followed by screams from the club outside. The red-haired woman barges into the room, smoke billowing from her skin, and grits out a report: "Hunters. Sunlight. Total compromise, serious breach risk." 

The vampires' gaze snaps up, breaking the spell of her eyes. "Damn it. Clean and contain the breach." 

She stalks from the room, her walk the casual lope of a predator. 

The red-haired woman turns, and points a pistol directly at Kai-zi's head.

She was never--

She was never--

He wakes up and there's a gun.

Slowly, shakily, he raises his hands.

She's going to kill him. He's going to die.

He imagines the hole in his head, gore splattered on the wall behind him, the blank fear frozen on his face when they find him. He imagines what it will feel like to have metal crack his skull and rip through his brain. What's the sensation you feel when the place that gives you sensation is destroyed?

(He tries very hard not to find this erotic.)

His tongue is too heavy in his mouth but he speaks anyway.

"I– please–..."

A very loud BANG, a blinding light, and a whumph of concussive force knocks him from his feet.

Where is he now? He reaches blindly out and feels leather beside him, which means...the chair. Somewhere next to the chair.

He can't hear anything but the whine in his ears, and can barely see through the spots. Ironically, the only thing keeping him from panicking is the searing pain in his shoulder.

He scrambles to turn around -- he can't see much, but something is better than nothing.

A braid of neon-blue hair almost smacks him in the face. Someone says something. A tattooed hand grabs his and yanks him more or less to his feet, then a needle sinks into his bitten arm and wow he sure is getting to experience a lot of new sensations today. This one feels like his insides are melting.

Wow, this is sure something he was unprepared for!

He feels like he's going to throw up, and he's pretty sure that when he does all of his organs will come out his mouth.

His legs almost buckle underneath him, but...at least his head isn't swimming quite as much?

He is having a very bad night.

"...whah...the fuck."

Oh, he could almost hear himself say that. Progress!

The braid's owner pats him on the cheek. "Hiiiiiii, friendly neighbourhood vampire hunter, try not to die, thanks!" 

He grabs at her arm, shaking his head to try to clear the ringing from his ears somehow. He still feels like he's about to vomit.

"What'd you even...shoot me up with?"

Her face swims into view: off to the side, something growls. The girl casually fires a bolt of... ball lightning??? at it from a chunky piece of scrap shaped vaguely like a pistol, and tries to shake off his hand. 

"Listen, you should maybe not grab at the girl who's trying to fight vampires right now."

He takes his hand off her reluctantly. He feels like if he stops touching anything he'll just float off into the ether.

Thank god he got grazed in the shoulder. That's something to focus on at least.

"Not grabbing! I'm chill now! What did you put in my body."

"Well, that's a long story, I call it tough juice, it's a complicated blend of nanobots, stimulants, hormones, and good old fashioned heroin except don't worry it's not addictive, I was careful and it does completely different things in the aggregate comp-" 

A giant wolf bounds from the cloud of smoke to the left of her, all snarling fangs and teeth. She backhands it across its muzzle with her gun, and it collapses to the floor with a buzz of electricity. 

"Neonates."

He loves weird shit but this is really hard to keep up with.

“Uh, okay, heroin? But it’s not—how does that even work? And—”

Oh shit. He jumps back from the wolf as she smacks it to the ground.

“Neonates?”

"New vampires. Think they're tough, especially the shapeshifty ones. Dunno their proper name, their biology - well, it's not biology, they're dead, but their physiology - is fascinating, I've repurposed some of that for the metabolic jumpstarter you've got going there, but -" 

The wolf raises its head, and she clubs it back down again with her gun. "Stay! Good dog." 

She looks at Kai-Zi and frowns. "Um, did you see where the older one went? You've got a fresh bite, they can't have gone far..."

“Uh...she went out the door, but I dunno what happened after that, I was sort of...”

He waves his hands a little.

“...out of it.”

"Yeaaaaaaah they do that. Okay thanks bye!" 

And off she goes down the corridor.

--oh, come on!

He runs after her.

Jinx is waiting around the next corner: as z comes around, she clotheslines him. 

"Yeah no, you have blood all over you, you're fucking vampire bait, staying here is a shit plan for you. Sit down and think about your life."

Ow. Seriously?

He goes down like a sack of bricks and coughs on the floor. He feels like he should have been able to stop in time, but he also feels like he's wearing a backpack full of lead. It's a lot harder to control his movements than it was ten minutes ago.

He sits down and thinks, but not necessarily about his life.

What did she stick him with? If it were just the heavy limbs and the weakness he'd get it, but his shoulder has definitely stopped bleeding faster than it reasonably should. What did she say, that it had heroin in it? That she reverse-engineered this from vampires somehow? 

It's so hard to grab a hold of – the more he tries to understand what's happening the more it slips out of his reach.

She looks at him. 

"...shit. Fucking shit." 

Casually, she tosses her gun at him. "Catch."

He barely manages to catch it, but he does. He would like his reflexes back as soon as possible.

As soon as he does, he stares down at the gun. This...barely looks from the outside like it should work at all, let alone produce the fantastic effect it does.

"...this shoots lightning. For some fucking reason."

He sounds a little dazed.

Jinx fixes him with a smile that's three shades too wide for sanity. 

"Look at it. Figure it out. Why does it shoot lightning?"

He never once thinks to tell her he's not a scientist.

His fingers scratch at the surface of the gun, trying to pry a panel away to expose the insides.

"It works...because..."

He feels something like vertigo, the dizzy rush of tipping into the abyss.

The panel comes away easily beneath his fingers, and something stings his hand in almost exactly not the way that a spark would.

Jinx leans in close enough for him to smell her breath. "Because I'm a fucking genius, that's why. Because physics do not fucking apply when I'm in the room. Because I'm the girl who can turn three pieces of scrap metal and a battery into a lightning gun. Because I'm Jinx - that's Dr. Explosions to you." 

She rips out one of his earrings, and twists it in her fingers, once, twice, working in his blood. When she opens her hand, a steel-blue grasshopper bounds up onto Kai-zi's shoulder. 

"You can keep the gun, I think it's gotten attached to you."