Concordia has done her mandatory bow-and-arrow training, and she could totally hit a Beast with an arrow at this range. With an unfamiliar weapon ... her chances are a lot more dicey, but at least she has the benefit of steady aim.

She aims at the Beast and pulls the trigger repeatedly, until the gun stops banging and starts clicking instead.

The not-a-blunderbuss kicks back with surprising force, and it fires as quickly as Concordia can pull the trigger. Unlike with a bow and arrow, she can't see the projectile, either in flight or after it hits. She misses a lot, but manages to get several more shots on target. Black ichor oozes from the beast's many wounds. One of her shots finds a leg, and the leg stops working properly. The Chasm beast limps forward, slowed and injured but just as vicious.

"Got it!" Lucas stands up with two rubber-coated paddles in his hands, connected by a cord to the suitcase. He adopts a defensive stance, holding them like daggers. "I need you to press the big white button when I touch it, okay?" Without waiting for confirmation, he looks towards the beast, trying to overcome his fear. "Hey ugly! I ain't never seen a werewolf before, and I'm not impressed. You get hurt by a kine officer? What kinda excuse for a monster are you?" His voice wavers, but he stands firm.

Emily dives for the defibrillator, and hovers her hand over the button.

Concordia glances back at the foreign mage, but he doesn't seem to be launching a spell.

But. He's clearly done something, the gun is empty, and she doesn't know how to recharge it. It doesn't feel like there's a spent focusing crystal, or anything.

She carefully retreats behind the man, ready to run or grab them and teleport, whichever seems called for.

"What is he doing?" she quietly asks the girl.

"When it gets close, the —"

Huh. She gets the sense that 'defibrillator' is ... the wrong word in some way.

"— the medical lightning box will channel lightning through those pads," she explains. "He's just trying to taunt it close enough."

... oh. Her spell picked up a healer. No wonder he couldn't launch a ranged artillery spell. She really needs practice at coming up with better conditions on the fly.

But she knows what got the beast's attention last time. She steps up behind the man — just far enough away not to get tangled if he needs to step back suddenly — and starts calling on the gods.

"By Veritas! By Aurora! By Focis!"

The Beast charges Lucas, or perhaps Concordia with Lucas in the way. Claws swipe up. Lucas dodges, lunges with the paddles, but misses. Before he can steady himself, the Beast attacks again. He blocks a claw-swipe with his forearm, and jams the paddles into the beast's body. Emily presses the button, and there's a loud beep. The Beast convulses... and drops. There's a smell of ozone and burnt fur.

Lucas steps back, wheezing. The Chasm Beast hit him hard in the stomach before it went down. Although the claws struck his arm dead-on, his forearm bears only a thin line of blood, as though the claws were a pocket-knife rather than the deadly blades Concordia knows them to be.

Is it dead?

Concordia really hopes that it's dead.

"We should cut its head off," she tells the girl, "just to be really sure that got it."

"R-Right," Emily manages, flopping back onto the pavement and staring at the pale Canadian sky. Now that she's no longer being chased, it's all sort of catching up with her.

"She says we should cut off it's head to be sure," she relays to the man, because priorities. And then "Thank you. Thank you so much, I'm so glad that you were here," because manners.

Lucas nods. "Haven't seen you two around before. Does your friend speak English?" He pokes tenderly at his belly. "Ugh, I think I broke a couple ribs. There's a knife under the passenger seat of my van, can you take care of it?" He leans up against a fence on the side of the alley.

Martinez groans and rolls over. He's lost a lot of blood, he's not exactly lucid... but he's alive. For now.

Emily has never butchered an animal in her life. But she bets that the teleporter — who seemed to assume that someone would have a sword available — probably has.

She fetches the knife from under the seat and passes it to her.

"She says she doesn't," Emily replies. "But I only know English and I can understand her just fine, so I don't know what's going on. Actually —"

She turns to the teleporter and says "Now that there's no monster, what's your name? I'm Emily." in fluent Imperial.

"I'm Concordia," she replies. "Trainee Mage Concordia Bucher."

She crouches by the Beast, and begins sawing at the hide of its neck.

"I heard of a Malkavian ghoul who understood other languages, but kept insisting he only spoke French. Fluently, in other languages. Is your master a Malk?"

Quietly, in the distance, a police siren sings out. "Great, more cops. Sunset's soon, but not that soon. God, how the hell did we have a Masquerade breach in daytime?"

Ha! She knew there was a masquerade. That means that once the book has wrapped up, she can just call her parent to come get her. Or maybe take the AmTrack, if they have AmTrack in Toronto.

"I don't know what a Malk is, and I'm nearly certain I'm not a ghoul," she tells him. Unless it's part of the masquerade that she is secretly part-ghoul, and will get magic powers from it.

"Do we ... need to get you to a hospital for your ribs?" she suggests.

Concordia listens with one ear to the barbarians as she focuses on separating the Beast's vertebrae. Now that she has had a moment to calm down, her mind is going over what she could have done better. Still, she was ultimately correct that a city would have someone who could stop it. She just wishes that she hadn't led it to a school first.

Actually, that's a good point. She makes a note to ask Emily where her school was, so they can send some mages to go check the area, once she's done talking to the healer.

"No, no hospital, no human doctors. We got half an hour to sunset. I don't have very many phone numbers, but I'll call one of the Prince's people. They should be able to get... a police cordon set up, or something."

Lucas stopped, and seemed to be wrestling with something.

"Well, you're not a ghoul, and obviously not Kindred. So none of my orders involve you. And you did probably save my life, since there's no way I would have killed that thing without knowing its weakness. So I'll just say: after I make this phone call, somebody will lock down the area, and after sunset the big boys are going to come in and do memory wipes on the bystanders. And ask the three of us a lot of questions. I've got broken ribs, and no gun. If getting mixed up in Cam business doesn't sound fun to you, I wouldn't be able to stop you from tying me up and leaving before more cops get here."

Emily blinks.

All of that sounds like he's expecting her to have a lot more context than she actually does. So the question is whether this is more of a Greek story — where she has to demonstrate the virtue of humility by asking questions — or more of a folk story, where she has to trick her way in without knowing what's going on.

... except she already has someone who knows about magic, and the man implied that she doesn't speak English when she's talking to her.

"Hey Concordia, why would sunset be important, what's a Kindred, and what's Cam business?"

The beast's head thumps to the pavement, and Concordia wipes the knife on its hide.

"No idea," she replies. "Maybe I could do better with some context?"

Emily relays what the man said in more detail.

Once the knife is clean-ish, she sets it down and starts cleaning her hands on her skirt.

"I ... still don't know what any of those things are. The healer sort of implied that we should tie him up, though," she points out. Although she's beginning to doubt that he's a very good healer, if his rib is still broken. Maybe barbarians haven't figured out how to heal broken bones? They don't have any good academies.

"Only if we don't want to get involved in 'Cam business'," Emily responds. "But maybe we do want to, if Cam business is magic."

Concordia shakes her head.

"Not if they're using mind magic," she insists. "It's dangerous, and illegal everywhere civilized."

That's good enough for Emily. She searches the truck for some rope, and begins tying the man up — with Concordia's help on some of the knots.