Wisp & Static

Your agents have secured all exits, aided with scanning devices that have discerned even the most well-hidden escape routes, of which you found startlingly many. They have entrenched themselves in the areas surrounding the central command room, but nobody has dared pass through into its interior, for inside waits your most formidable prey yet.

You step up to the plate. You are the one they sent to handle her, and you will be the one to do it; your powers negate hers, there is no way she can defeat you. As the doors clear your path into the small cylindrical chamber, near instantly is a massive bolt of crackling green energy projected at you, one you deftly deflect with an already outstretched arm and prepared bubble of diffusive energy. The powerful lightning crackles across your shield as you slowly step inside, announcing yourself with a voice so forceful as to be uncharacteristic of you.

"Wisp! This is over! You-you're surrounded! There's n-no possible way for you to evade us, b-but if you come peacefully we can work with you!"

There she stands. Enveloped in raging green light, jittering, twitching, terrified and enraged, is Wisp. She is almost impossible see through the energy that courses from her body, so overflowing and unrelenting. The charge in this room is so great that your suit registers it as a dangerous electromagnetic field; sparks of electricity form and dissipate in the air, seemingly with each breath she draws. Screens of green light flash along the entire cylinder for a short moment, before they fall dark.

Wisp says nothing to you. She merely drops down from the hard-light platform she stands on, now on the same level as you. You raise your pistol, but she does not make any sudden movements. Slowly, she takes steps towards you; the base's klaxon blaring seems to grow louder as she approaches, and your comms start to flicker before shutting off entirely, but you give her the faintest benefit of the doubt as it would seem she is surrendering. Before she comes any closer, you issue an order:

"On your knees, h-hands up!" You keep your firearm trained on her, finger off the trigger. She sinks to her knees, the energy starting to strip away from her slowly, as if calming. You take a few steps forward, and begin to speak:

"In, in; all sides." Although she doesn't hear that command issued, she does seem cognizant of the doors on both sides being forced open as C.C.I.I.A. agents flood into the room, perking up a bit and glancing at each squad. They all have their weapons trained on her, and all of them seem just as nervous as you do, almost.

"Wisp, y-you are under arrest for—"

A thunderous clap occurs. All at once, the energy she was enveloped with quickly returns. The screens in the room shatter with force, spewing glass everywhere, the heads-up display on your helmet turns off, and your firearm explodes in your hand, barely avoiding serious injury thanks to your armor. The same occurs for most of the other agents in the room; although the anti-psionic field your armor comes standard with would normally be enough to protect you from such effects, this is something else entirely.

Wisp dashes. Before you can recover from the stun and draw your rifle, she is enshelled with hard-light and propels herself with great force, slamming into you, electrocuting your weakened armor and throwing you out of the way as she goes. You hear confused yelling and a lot of movement as she apparently scatters the squad that was backing you up; gunfire pursues her, but nothing you hear implies anyone hit her. Staggered and dazed, like everyone else in the room, you barely gather the presence of mind to start chasing her.

You order your fellow agents to try and flank her, and those at the entrances begin to prepare for her—although you are fast, you suspect she is much faster. The labyrinthine corridors of this compound don't help you in the aim of tracking her. She knows them far better than you do, but the faint trail of energy she leaves gives you enough to go on.

After a time, you come upon her: she is moving up the central corridor of the compound, slowed somewhat by the stairs in the room, trying to reach one of the exit paths. Rifle drawn, you take aim and fire; you see it graze her, shedding glowing green blood, causing her to stagger and yell in frustration; you fire again, and this time the bullet strikes her directly in the leg and she falls. Quickly, you begin to sprint up after her, and agents start to file in after you as well.

She, remarkably, begins to pull herself to her feet. The energy she was previously billowing with now is forming a violent torrent around her. That energy all pulls itself into a pillar of lightning, fired chaotically towards you but veering off course; it instead crashes through the catwalk, melting it into slag instantly and searing your armor so thoroughly merely by proximity that it actually gives you a pretty serious burn. Worse, the energy strikes the agents on the lower catwalk directly, instantly killing two of them and mutilating the third, shearing his arm off. The force of it all, and the almost intoxicating aura of power surrounding her, has you spend much more time than you should dazed and trying to recover, robbed of your situational awareness and desperately trying to come to. Something about her abilities is much more than simple lightning.

Before you can recover, she has vanished. You start to give chase again, her trail even more visible than before thanks to the glowing blood on the floor, but between the burn and damaged hand, it's difficult to keep pace at all. By the time you have next caught up with her, she has made it to the compound's docking bay—perhaps the easiest of the exits for her to escape through.

She is atop a small ship whose construction you cannot immediately identify, preparing to climb into its cockpit. As you step into the room, she seems to immediately notice you. Although she is still seething with energy, it has calmed, perhaps because she looks so exhausted thanks to the wounds you put in her. You raise your rifle again, and fire—this time, she deflects with her robotic arm, and returns fire.

A bolt of electricity streaks towards you, but this time you manage to pull enough wherewithal together to rebuff it—a flash of white forms a shield of diffusive energy in front of you, which you hold firm as the electricity ripples and tears across it until the bolt has expired.

"Wisp, y-you can't keep fucking running! We'll find you again, and, and again, and one of these t-times you won't get away!"

She screams, with unbridled, unhinged rage: "I've been running all my fucking life, and I'll keep running until you put me the fuck down! Until you get the courage to do it already, good fucking bye!"

 As you raise your weapon to try and fire at her again, you hesitate such that she's permitted to slip into the ship's cockpit and slam it shut. The bullets ricochet off of the vessel's armored exterior, and before the doors can even open she's gunning it; her ship slams through the shutters and takes off into the sky, scattering the squad that had been posted outside. You stagger outside, watching a Chaser attempt to intercept the vessel—however, it simply vanishes.

You let yourself slip to the ground against the nearby wall as the dust settles, dragging a hand down your mask and sighing. Maybe next time.