It had been a fairly average day, so far as Aegle was concerned. She'd gotten up at five that morning, just the same as every morning, run through her daily regime of morning exercises, tinkered around a bit with some ideas she had for the Oupis, then gone to class for the first half of her day. Classes had been nothing special, almost universally filled with disposable knowledge as they were, but she'd learned something handy about aura control, so they hadn't been a complete waste of her time. She'd taken an early supper, following a visit with Lily at the hospital, and then set into her evening exercises just a few minutes later than usual. Well, evening exercises and supper weren't exactly the right words. Her 'early supper' had been more of a late lunch, while her evening exercises had actually begun in the late afternoon. Still, Aegle wasn't one to dwell on such irrelevant details. Her exercises and training hadn't been anything especially special either. Today had been a endurance day, which had meant an abundance of cardio exercises with some knuckle conditioning to mix things up. She was making some real headway there, at least, and had barely bled at all. Indeed, the callouses were coming along quite nicely, though she found it was taking a while to develop the necessary fractures to strengthen her bones. She had considered dialing up her brace's intensity, but had settled for instead for spending a little longer slugging the wall. A satisfying throb persisted in the primary joints of her left hand, as if to commend the decision. 

It had grown late by the time Aegle decided to draw her exercises to a close, a point she was inured to pretty much as soon as she slipped out of the training building. The sky was already growing dark, and the suggestion of stars were already beginning to dot the furthest horizon with small pin-pricks of light. Aegle took this development in stride; Losing track of time while training was such a common occurrence for her that she specifically organized her schedule to account for it. Well, organized was probably not the best word, given that Aegle and organization had a strained relationship at best... Still, walking out of the training cells to find the world already falling asleep was not an experience which Aegle found remarkable. Not anymore.

To look at her, as she ambled across the stony path that lead from the training building, it would be hard to guess she'd just spent the better part of a day rigorously testing her stamina and endurance. Sure, her gait wasn't the steadiest of things, -Her exact method of locomotion more resembled a limp than a walk-, but she moved with confidence and persistence, if not actual grace. Her scalp, that not adorned by a slightly wilted mohawk, glistened in the evening air, polished to a shine following her evening shower, and her emerald eyes danced with enthusiasm and vitality. Sure, she stood half-crooked by a perpetual slouch, one shoulder ever so slightly lower than the other, but she carried herself with every suggestion of ease one could reasonably expect from a girl less than five feet tall. She radiated happiness and self-satisfaction, not at any particular accomplishment, and seemed to glow in the growing gloom.

Then she spied something that was actually glowing in the evening gloom, and all that self-assured inattention was traded for unabashedly piqued interest. It was uncommon, but not unheard of, for the outdoor fields to see a bit of use in the early evening. Uncommon enough that Aegle, who regularly saw the fields at a much later hour than most, was surprised to find it occupied, and by someone surrounded in a corona of light no less. It was only a few more steps before she felt it as well. A rapid eruption of power and and force that struck her without actually touching her, Aegle felt the surprising compulsion to raise her hand to her fact and ward of some intangible heat. As if she were staring into the heart of a furnace fire. Her brace whirred mechanically as she drew closer, its perpetual song half muffled by her fluttering hoodie and capacious cargo pants, while a grin stretched broad across her thin lips. She hadn't been sure before, whether she was looking at someone's semblance or simply their aura. Now, drawing near, close enough to feel the finer details that radiated out from the emblazoned figure, she was almost certain. And she was impressed. To express one's aura in so vibrant a fashion was no mean feat, and to maintain that expression was equally difficult. Aegle aught to know; Her semblance all but required the expression of her aura to perform to its fullest.

Whirring quietly, Aegle moved slowly around the sapphire inferno, her beaming countenance painted blue in the fiery glow. She left about ten feet between herself and the burning figure, whom she now saw to be both female and faunus, and admired the abundant strength of her aura without getting close enough to risk actual burns. She didn't doubt that such an intense and fiery soul could actually burn her, and had been burned enough times that she no longer embraced the opportunity. Still, she watched with wide eyes, thoroughly enthralled and utterly shameless to show it.
"Woaaah. S'like someone set ice on fire..."


Shio Kyrou

Then, just like that, the whole sapphire pyre collapsed in on itself before exploding out in all directions, like the heart of a fire work, and leaving the whole world to look much darker and colder in its absence. It sparked wonderment in Aegle's open face, which had grown slack and wide-eyed in the final eruption of icy cinder, issued forth from Shio's vanished aura. She had seem some pretty magnificent displays of aura since starting on the path to becoming a huntress; It sometimes seemed like any excuse would suit a huntsman in training to express their aura, if it was a trick they could manage. Not that Aegle really minded. Every aura was different, and you could tell a lot from a person from the way their aura looked and felt, and Shio seemed especially magnificent to Aegle as a direct result. Her's was a soul that burned; It bloomed blue-hot and blossomed out like the heart of an inferno, raging with awe inspiring power and humbling resolve. Aegle had liked it at a glance.

Of course, to get an accurate measure of a person, one typically needed more than a few moments spent observing their aura. Not Aegle, however. Her opinion of the faunus girl, whose name she did not yet know, was already quite well developed, so far as such things went. What she'd seen had made her almost singularly certain that she liked Shio, without even needing to know more about her. After all, she was a huntress in training whose aura had shown her to be both resolute and passionate; What else could Aegle possibly need to know about her?

That was why, when Shio finally condescended to turn her scornful amber eyes upon the Aegle, the smaller girl had nothing but smiles for her. Aegle's face was lit up like the guest of honor at a birthday party, with an unaffected and utterly guileless smile on her lips and an excited redness in her pale cheeks. She hardly seemed to notice the deadly intensity of the faunus girl's stare, and perceived the implied threat within it, not at all. To look at Aegle's expression, so genuinely bright and friendly and wholly oblivious to the venom being directed at her, one could almost believe she was greeting a familiar friend, rather than being stared down upon by a capable fighter, one making every effort to convey her displeasure. 

In short, though Shio radiated hostility in ever aspect of her being, and gave every impression of being a decidedly capable aggressor, Aegle didn't notice. She gave no pause, offered no hesitation, and did not so much as imply the slightest bit of trepidation. Her lack of fear, however, did not seem born from any sort of bravery but, rather, a complete failure to perceive the very clear signals Shio was broadcasting. Signals of potentially painful reprisal.
"Yeah?" The faunus girl said finally, "What is it you want, small fry?"
Her tone was so acidic as to make a boiling sulfurous lake seem preferable by comparison. Each word elaborated on the already clear message of threat and hostility that her body language had done such a fine job to convey. Like something volatile left over an open flame; Inert for the moment, but in need of only a single spark to produce spectacularly brutal result.

Aegle barely noticed, and her attitude and body language said so as clear as if they had spoken aloud. She smiled up at Shio, unfazed even by the condescending comment about her size. And why shouldn't she be? Aegle was not unaware of her small stature, and had heard much more direct and insulting comments about it. She was a bit surprised by how intense the faunus girl had gotten, but looking at her aura had prepared her for some volatility already. Nobody whose soul burned the way Shio's did, was going to be mild-mannered. She did not, however, grasp the full danger that Shio was attempting to convey to her, and had not chosen to regard this encounter as something that might turn violent. In fact, the very possibility that Shio might react to her in a hostile fashion fell so far outside of Aegle's expectations, that it hadn't even crossed her might that her disruptive behavior might be annoying the taller girl. Indeed, she didn't even realize she was being disruptive.
"Want?" Aegle repeated back, still wearing her amiable and oblivious smile. "I don't want nothin'; I was just watchin'. 'Least I was until ya stopped, anyway."
Without the howl of Shio aura to muffle it, the exact nature of Aegle's voice was made clear at this point. It was possessed of a gratingly high pitch, as if eternally on the verge of cracking, and employed with all the subtly of dentistry with a sledge hammer. Indeed, it seemed impossible that something so effortlessly loud could come from such a small person as Aegle. What was more, she didn't actually appear to be shouting, only talking at what was, for her at least, a normal volume. Not only did this imply the alarming possibility that Aegle could be much, much, much louder if she chose, it keenly illustrated her utter lack self awareness. 
"S'really cool, ya know? Your aura I mean. M'assuming that was your aura; Don't reckon it was your semblance, unless your semblance is supposed to look all fiery and hot without really doin' nothin'. I guess your trainin', huh? Why'd ya stop?"

Shio Kyrou

Initially, all the answer Aegle received was silence and a dangerously corrosive glare, either of which should have been sufficient to inure her to the precarious situation she'd insinuated herself into. Yet, it had been so long since Aegle felt the slightest hint of reservation, much less fear, that any sense of danger had long ago atrophied. Remaining wholly at ease, it wasn't until Shio actually spoke that some cracks began to show in the smaller girl's shell of blissful ignorance.
"Are you... mocking me?"
At last, Aegle's smile slipped. Only slightly at first, like a raindrop on the surface of a still lake, but gradually her expression began to change. She looked confused at first, as she laboriously wrapped her brain around Shio's question, then startled as she realized precisely what she was being asked, and finally back to confused. Aegle's face was naturally expressive and well suited to broadcasting her habitually huge emotions with unmistakable clarity, and right then was no exception. She didn't simply look baffled or a little put out, but as though her very understanding of the world had been challenged in a most singularly unexpected fashion. It was such a fundamentally clueless expression as the drift dangerously close to absolute parody, a fate from which it was saved only by the complete sincerity with which Aegle wore it. 

In short, Aegle looked exactly as though she had just been slapped, full and in the face, by a still-wet fish.

"Mocking you?" The smaller girl finally croaked out, "Like, makin' fun of you?" 
It was no hyperbole to say that the thought of mocking Shio, or anyone else for that matter, had never so much as crossed Aegle's mind. The very notion was so alien in fact, that, up until the moment Shio had suggested it, the very possibility that her actions might be perceived as mockery would not have occurred to Aegle. Now that it had occurred to her, she struggled to make any sense of it. How anything she'd said could be mistaken for mockery, she did not know, and the very suggestion struck her as incredibly unfair. Aegle was just about to say as much when Shio cut her off.
"Leave." Speaking quietly, the faunus girl's instruction lost none of its vehemence for the softness of her voice. Aegle could only goggle at her, looking exactly how a tragic pedestrian must have looked, watching as the truck that had run them over drove blithely away. The implied threat in Shio's imperative flew right over her head, but the dismissal had registered clear enough, even for the habitually oblivious half-pint.

"Now hold on... D'ya think if I were mockin' you that I would have told ya how pretty your aura is?" She asked shrilly, her puzzled emerald eyes wide incomprehension. Unsurprisingly, for anyone who'd spent more than five minutes around Aegle Vitus, her mouth had long-ago outrun her brain. 
"I mean, maybe I don't know what mockin' is, but shouldn't I mock somethin' bad about you?" Tone as mild as her icepick of a voice could manage, Aegle sounded less rhetorical and more like she was genuinely asking for an explanation. She didn't wait to hear one though, her mouth already sprinting on ahead, neverminding that it was probably running in the wrong direction.
"That's how mockin' works, yeah? You pick somethin' bad and make fun of it, like how scruffy your clothes are or how weird your hair looks. Or like how y'ain't standin' right and how funny ya look when ya move. Why don'tcha wear somethin' that aint fallin' apart, yer a disgrace. And your voice, s'like a rusty nail in the ear. Or how you're weird and weak, and you ain't ever gonna be nothin', so you ought to just stop tryin', right?"
Aegle mildly, almost absently, offered each of her examples, throwing them out, rapid-fire, as fast as she could form the words. She didn't stop to think about how Shio, already inclined to misunderstand her, might not realize that Aegle was simply listing the ways she, herself, had been mocked. She most certainly didn't consider how the faunus girl might respond to so many offhandedly suggested insults.
"I mean... I guess I might be doin' it wrong. I ain't so good at mockin' people, right? Maybe I'm missin' somethin'..." Aegle meandered to a stop, and there wasn't so much as a trace of irony in anything she had said. For all intents, she had been completely sincere in every word she'd said, honestly just trying to clarify her understanding of mockery and explain why she didn't think anything she'd done qualified. It probably wasn't the best course to take, not when Shio had grown lethally quiet, but that obviously hadn't occurred to Aegle. If it had, she may have been a bit more careful with what she said.

Maybe, but probably not.

Nobody would ever accuse Aegle of being normal. Whatever other, wholly legitimate criticisms could be leveled at her, Normality was not among them. Thus, it was not with trepidation nor concern, both normal responses, that she regarded Shio's increasingly ominous behavior. Having said her piece, she watched with something closer to confusion than concern as the taller faunus locked her with a deadly glare. Though radiating of threat and danger, and though Shio was making no effort to conceal her bestial rage, whatever concern Aegle did feel was not for herself, but for the faunus in question.
"Y'alright?" She asked, tipping her head inquiringly to one side, her tone perfunctory and unconcerned, like she was addressing someone whom she'd just watch stub their toe. Especially conspicuous by its absence was even the merest suggestion of fear. So devoid of phobic animation was Aegle, in fact, that it came across less like bravery and more like fundamental psychological ignorance. In truth, she'd not even begun to consider that she might be in any danger, and the dangerous glare that Shio fixed her with had done little to change that fact. She was as blind to all the warning signs as a deaf woman would have been to a fire alarm.

Rather than answer, or possibly in lieu of an answer, flames began to pop into igneous brilliance all around the infuriated faunus as smoldering manifestations of her anger. Surprise, but still no fear, flashed across Aegle's pallid, red cheeked countenance, and her emerald eyes flicked quickly to note each flame as it burst into being. These didn't feel like the fire before. Both had been hot, both had raged, yet these somehow managed to feel worlds apart from those which had drawn her to the faunus girl. It was like the difference between a raging forest fire and the very heart of a burning building, of the same matter yet somehow distinct from one another. 
"Your semblance?" Aegle asked, only guessing outloud, but Shio had no answers for her and was already turning away. Aegle watched, intrigued but wholly unthreatened, as the taller girl put a decent running distance between them and then turn around to face her once again. Again, the smaller girl tipped her head to the side in unspoken question, as if she truly hadn't understood the implied threat in absolutely everything the lupine huntress had done up until that point. For truly, she had not. There wasn't the merest suggestion of fear nor trepidation on her open face, only an entreating curiosity and incomprehension, like she was watching something as interesting as it was unknowable. Aegle did not notice the heavy footprints that Shio left in the ground, but then she didn't need to. The intensity of her aura, her inner strength made material about her, was sufficient to let Aegle know some tangible change had overtaken the taller girl, even if she did not yet comprehend the nature of that change. She wondered, altogether distantly, if they were about to fight each other. That was the very first time that any risk had occurred to Aegle, and it was so utterly disposable a thought that it might as well have never even occurred at all. The fact of the matter was that Aegle neither knew nor cared if she was about to be in a fight, even one against someone as clearly dangerous and potentially unstable as Shio had shown herself to be. The very possibility was wholly moot, so far as she was concerned, representing less something to be concerned about and more an interesting development in her atypical brain. Still, even as the possibility of violence finally inured itself to Aegle, there was no fear, nor even something which convincingly resembled it. Only blithe but wholly honest interest in the development of events, like she was somehow just an observer and not actually in any danger herself. 

Then Shio crouched down, and even Aegle couldn't fail to notice the perfunctory effort she required to dig her fingers into the ground. That, at least, garnered a raised eyebrow from the smaller girl. Taking her hands out of her pockets, curling her bandaged fingers into fists, Aegle prepared herself in the most perfunctory way imaginable. She was not intimidated by such a showing of effortless strength, anymore so than she had been by the second coming of Shio's inner fire, but she was not so dismissive of what it all meant to get ready. 
"Ya know..." She started to say, but before she could get any further, Shio leaped at her. And what a leap it was. Like someone had loaded the burning girl into a cannon, the faunus shot at Aegle in a perfectly straight, gravity defying line; Aegle would have marveled at the physical strength such a linear trajectory required, had she not had much more immediate concerns. As things stood, her instincts took over well ahead of her brain, and all conscious consideration of the situation was given up in favor of reflexive response. Dodging was wholly out of the question, a conclusion her subconscious had already reached; The attack had been too sudden and too impossibly fast. So Aegle didn't even attempt to get out of the way. Raising her guard and parrying the blow was similarly pointless. Even if she had been fast enough to intercede, there was no possible way she could deflect a blow of such inconceivable power. So Aegle didn't even attempt to block. Getting hit was inevitable, a fact all Aegle's instincts and training reported in the split seconds before impact. All she could do was make it worth it.

Aegle watched Shio approach; Not Shio's fist or the Shio sized crater she'd left in her wake, but Shio. And as that burning fist descended upon Aegle with every promise of destruction, Aegle's gaze did not waver, and her small body did not flinch. And, a split second before it made contact with her cheek, Aegle's own fist connected with the very center of Shio's stomach. Of all the possible punches Aegle could have thrown, an uppercut was probably the most understated, yet it was also the one best suited to the situation. Her hands were low, Shio was coming at her high and outstretched, ready to deliver the mother of all haymakers, core completely exposed. Not that Aegle had a chance to see if her punch had any effect, for before she could even feel the familiar give of unguarded flesh beneath her weathered knuckles, she was flying backwards with stars in her eyes. A whole universe burst into light and then faded back into darkness as she sailed, perfectly parallel to the ground, a good fifteen feet before making abrupt and energetic connection with the ground. Connecting with her shoulders first, Aegle first dug a shallow furrow in the earth before her feet, carrying on straight over her head, yanked her bodily into a somersault. When her feet made contact with the earth a split second later, there was no strength in her legs to keep her upright, and Aegle folded over herself for a subsequent flip that somehow ended with her sliding, face down, a few more feet across the grassy ground. All of which occurred without a single sound from the smaller girl. It was only once she came to a merciful stop, close to thirty feet from where she'd started, that so much as a peep came from Aegle's lips. Said peep was actually more of a formless groan, accompanied by the only slightly louder whir of electric motors as she got her hands under her and pushed herself unsteadily to her knees, then even more unsteadily to her feet. She swayed drunkenly for a moment, made another barely audible sound, then turned unsteadily toward the direction she'd come from. There was a dull, dazed look in her emerald eyes, which appropriately accented the skewed set of her lips, made crooked by the unaccountable slant that presently affected her jaw. All the color had been driven out the side of her face where Shio's fist had connected, while the other side burned with feverish brightness. Unsteadily, she reached up and, as if she'd wholly forgotten about the faunus girl, she felt the uneven set of her jaw. A small trail of blood dribbled from her lips, and something like recognition flashed in her dazed green eyes, before she clasped her chin and, rather roughly, jerked it one way and then another, to a chorus of sickening popping sounds. With the colorless side of her face growing steadily darker in hue, Aegle then spat a glob of phlegmy red spit to the grass beside her and rubbed her previously dislocated jaw. At which point, as if only just remembering where she was and what she was doing, she looked expectantly in Shio's direction.


Shio Kyrou