An Inexplicable Fire

[Nina Stenet]

"We can't be any closer?" Nina asks, frowning at the distance between her and the lab. It's going to be rather difficult for her to use her power at this distance, though she can manage it if she has to.

"Not that's out of view of any security cameras, the road..." Shawty starts to list off, before Nina interrupts with, "I know, I'm just griping. But I'll manage." They're presently peering through a clump of bushes a couple hundred feet from the lab. Which happens to be just close enough for Nina to spot the security guard patrolling around the building. In the weeks since her arrest and escape, Nina assumes that the FBI has cleaned the place out of anything of value that they could, but there's some equipment that's 'built in' and the building itself has some value so she supposes that they want someone keeping an eye on it at night in addition to the security system they've likely taken over.

Trusting Shawty's judgment that this hiding spot is safe, she peers out at the security guard walking around the building as she attempts to locate him with her power. That's actually a lot more difficult than doing what she's going to do to him when she 'finds' him - the distance plus the fact that he's moving makes sensing him on the microscopic level very difficult. In fact, it isn't until his third time around the building while they're watching that she finally says, "There he is!"

She hears Shawty shift uncomfortably next to her, but keeps her focus on the man, finding one of his nerves and using it as something to follow that will lead her to his brain. And once there, she begins to carefully mess with the balance of chemicals inside of it, encouraging certain hormones to be released, brain pathways to be suppressed. Is there anyone else in the world that can temporarily give a person a severe case of cataplexy? If so, she'd like to meet them.

"Done," she announces when she's finished, stretching her good leg. The two of them don't really need to talk as Shawty quietly leads Nina away from their hiding place and to a different position. They've rewritten and rehearsed this plan so many times that they could both probably do their respective jobs in their sleep. For this move the tricky part is that Nina is back to using her crutches - she'll only walk on her knee the absolute minimum amount this evening. Their next hiding spot is less secure, but quite a bit closer. They needed to be somewhere they could hide indefinitely while she tackled the man's brain. Brains want their chemistry to remain stable, so it had taken her a long time to get it where it needs to be, while they'll only be in this new spot for a few moments.

Just long enough for her to hand Shawty her crutches and say, "Less than three minutes."

"More than three minutes," Shawty insists.

Nina smirks as she makes sure that her mask is perfectly positioned and the brace helping her knee is hidden. She's about to be seen by some cameras, so now is her last chance to make sure her costume is perfect. Then she looks ahead past some trees at the lab: one last task before she can go - find the knob of the front door with her gift now in order to save time.

"The time starts now then," Nina says once she's ready, and with that she steps into the open.

[Nina Stenet]

Careful to keep her stride a casual walk as she approaches the building, all of Nina's attention is on the doorknob of the main entrance. She has the key, actually, unless the FBI changed the locks, but either way she wouldn't be able to use it or reveal even more of a connection between her masked self and her real self than she already has. Instead she'll use her power - specifically on the screws holding the doorknob and dead bolt in place. A normal thief wouldn't be able to do that since the screws only reach the surface on the inside part of the doorknob, but her power can go through things.

She ignores the security guard as he rounds the corner and spots her approaching. Actually, she'd specifically timed it so that when he spotted her he'd be in full view of the security camera when the adrenaline surge caused by the realization that he has a masked woman approaching the building he's guarding completes the final trigger for a catapleptic fit: he suddenly just collapses, unable to move. Nina could have done that more directly with her power, but she knew at this point she'd be too focused on the doorknob to paralyze the man too. A little prep work beforehand will again save her a lot of time now.

By the time she reaches the door, she grabs the knob with her gloved hand and gives it a hard yank. Both the inside and outside handles of the knob break off, the latter falling to the floor while the former ends up in her hand. Then it's only a matter of about two seconds to open the locking mechanism with her fingers before she's in through the door. She picks up the inside part of the knob and then places both into a small bag on her hip just big enough to hold them - the FBI will never get to see the evidence of just what she did to the door.

She heads down the hallway and goes right for the utility room. As the building was always a private business staffed by only two people and locked on the outside whenever she and Shawty were away, they never bothered putting locks on the interior doors. She locates the valves and turns off the water - that feeds the sprinkler system and would put out any fires. Undesirable. And she checks the natural gas valve, turning it on when she sees that they shut it off. She'll need that for this next part. Heading out of the utility closet, she goes back down the hallway and into the lab area, and in a quick stroll through the room she makes sure to pass all of the lab's gas lines and open them.

Then she casually heads to a particular corner of the lab that she knows lies just outside of the security camera's view. When they were installing cabinets in the lab for her, she'd noticed that there was a wide gap there between the side of the cabinet and the wall. The guys installing the cabinets explained that it's normal to have those and that they put a filler piece there and it looks totally normal. And they were right. And it wasn't difficult to pry that filler piece out, install a hidden hinge on it, and she had herself a hidden slot to store her extremely important laptop in case of an emergency that completely blends in. She'd even made sure that the security cameras would just miss that corner, just in case.

Stepping into that spot, she slides open the door and to her relief, if not her surprise, it's still in there. She pulls it out and slides it behind her back, just under her shirt. The color black, which she's wearing, can make it very difficult to see the exact shape of it, especially in two dimensions such as on film. She's hoping that the security footage won't be clear enough for it to show that her back is suddenly a bit too flat and rectangular, but even if it does anyone watching it shouldn't be able to easily identify what she has. Cautious of dropping the valuable bit of equipment, she'd even come up with a makeshift harness for it that can hold it there securely and she clips the bottom of it into place.

But now she can feel herself getting a little light-headed from the gas - a good sign, because this room needs to have plenty of it for this last part - so she holds her breath for this last bit. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a tiny container with a small amount of dark powder and pours it into a little pile on the counter near one of the open gas lines. Then, after making sure that her mental focus is on the powder, she leaves the lab and takes a deep breath of the relatively gas-free hallway. She continues walking until she reaches the lobby by the receptionist desk before she starts to worry that her focus on the powder, now out of sight, won't hold so she pauses there for a moment as she slides several particles of it hard against the countertop.

Ferrocerium is a man-made metal that throws off sparks easily if its quickly broken into smaller pieces. Using her power to drive it across the countertop quickly enough is an easy way for her to do that, so the same moment she does, the natural gas filling the lab area suddenly explodes. The building is slightly shaken by the blast and Nina finds herself grabbing hold of the reception desk to keep herself steady, but an explosion hadn't been the point; instead the point is that suddenly a large section of the building is on fire. By the time anyone will be able to respond to it the entire building should be in flames.

A sudden smile reaches her face as she leaves the building, now knowing that her plan has been a complete success: she has her laptop, the building will be lost, and she doubts that anyone at the FBI will be able to explain anything she just did. The guard's brain chemistry will return to normal within a couple of hours, she has the door knobs, and the ferrocerium will be consumed by the fire. She pauses once as she leaves, looking up at the security camera monitoring the front of the building with a grin on her face, and flips off the camera. She really hopes that the security tapes will survive the fire, just so Agent Tiff can watch.

[Nina Stenet]

Then Nina walks off the same way she came, meeting Shawty at the same place she'd left her crutches. The young woman hadn't stayed there, but monitored Nina the entire time from a better viewpoint, there just in case the plan when horribly wrong and she needed backup. However, by making sure that she'd spent as little time doing it as possible, she could almost negate all of the risk simply because it would take people time to get there. "How long?" she asks Shawty once she's back out of view. But they don't stop there: she takes her crutches and they quickly get back to Shawty's car so that they can get as far away from here as possible before the emergency responders show up.

"Two minutes, forty three seconds," Shawty replies.

Nina smirks, "Told you." Actually, she almost suspects that Shawty claimed that it would take her longer just to give her that much motivation to make sure she did the whole thing quickly. As if knowing that the feds could show up at any time wasn't enough motivation!

Shawty gets into the front seat, but Nina gets into the back. She has some changing to do. As the car starts heading back to east Gotham's warehouse district, Nina removes her mask and returns her hair to its characteristic ponytail almost instantly feeling more like herself with just those two changes. Then she pulls off the black cashmere sweater so that she can take off the harness holding her laptop. She also needs to exchange the knee brace for her knee immobilizer - and she checks the joint as she does so.

The damage done is enough to take the smile off of her face. For a few moments anyway. She must have added at least an extra week of time to how long it will take for it to actually heal. Totally worth it, but a week. And she's really, really glad that she numbed the joint completely, because she can tell that the amount of pain that it's trying to send her brain would be truly crippling. Poor thing. At least she can tell it that it's been avenged now.

"Pull over when you find a quiet spot - we need to talk shop," Nina says once she's done sorting herself out.

Shawty complies several moments later and turns around in her seat. Nina hands her the laptop. "I can't hang onto this right now - Edward and I are leaving the city soon, and there are much safer places for it than with me or leaving it behind at the warehouse. And you have more places in the city to hide it than I do anyway. I don't want you to keep it with you in case something happens to you, and I need to know where it will be, just in case," she explains.

Shawty is silent for a moment as she almost reverently holds the laptop. As far as she knows, they're the only two people in the world who know just how important it is. "Dolores Richardsen - lives on sixth street. Haven't talked to her in a couple years, but she knew my mother and I trust her," she says simply. Nina nods, deciding that she likes the sound of that - a person that Shawty thinks is that trustworthy yet is unlikely to draw the FBI's attention would be ideal.

"You're leaving?" Shawty then asks pointedly, obviously wanting to know everything.

But Nina doesn't think that it's a good idea to tell Shawty everything, as much as she trusts the young woman, so she only says, "Yes, so don't try going back to the warehouse again."

Shawty frowns in frustration at that. "How am I supposed to do my job and protect you if you leave Gotham without me?" she asks.

Nina can't help but smile a little at that. "I'll be with Edward, he'll protect me," she says reassuringly.

"Sure he will..." Shawty replies sarcastically.

Nina sighs a little as she says, "Look, there isn't much of a choice. He doesn't like you, so you can't come with us, and while I could ask to be left behind I really don't want to. I don't know how or exactly when we're leaving, but even if that's dangerous I'll be a lot safer outside of Gotham than I am in it."

Shawty frowns but seems to accept that much, but she asks, "What about if I find my own way out?"

Nina has to smirk at that - yeah, she wouldn't exactly be surprised if Shawty did manage that. "Call me and tell me. I'll have my cell phone and we might be able to work something out in that case. But I don't want you to risk yourself too much - it's much more important to me that you keep yourself alive and out of jail. And even if you're stuck in Gotham, I want you to call me at least once a week," she answers and instructs.

Shawty nods to that, silently indicating that she's willing to go along with that. "Anything else?" she asks.

Pondering a moment, Nina says, "No, I think that covers everything. And I just want to get back so that I can get some sleep." It is, after all, so late that it's actually very early in the morning and she has a big day ahead of her. She just hopes that Edward didn't catch her absence or is too busy to deal with it if he did - she's exhausted and not really mentally prepared to do battle with him right now.

(OOC Note: For some context to this thread, this happened about an hour after Nina's meeting with Gordon, the night before Nina, Edward, and Jimmy went off to China. Also, if any FBI, vigilantes, or the like want to reply to this indicating how they reacted to it, feel free.)