Optik

Life, Crime

When "Special Projects" at the Gironde School needs a quiet intel pickup from a rainy corner of New York City, Jean-Claude Gironde assigns the task to the two adults in the building currently most on his nerves: Sleet and Blackjack. He then puts it out of his mind.

It should have been a quiet, six hour round trip assignment, including twenty minutes for the pickup and forty minutes for a casual meal.

Instead, a mercenary named Retro kidnaps them.

The hour for the two men's return comes and goes. Dr. Gironde begins to check up on progress. When he finds evidence that the meeting was disrupted by a kidnapping, he immediately summons Jarissa to his office so that he can manage her reaction.

Which is, predictably, full of murderous intentions.
Less predictably, perhaps, is that Feral can be so coldly analytical about all the possible antagonists (focused on either man in their own right, in addition to hostile interests regarding Wyldfire) as well as considering -- then quickly dismissing -- the possibility of an attack of opportunity.

Dr. Gironde declares that he will accompany Feral on the rescue mission.

Additional complications in the course of tracking down Retro:

• Rafferty finds them. To delay Feral's investigation, he subdues Gironde, straps the unconscious body into a harness, and dangles it off the side of a skyscraper. Vexed, Feral murders Rafferty a second time. (It again does not stick.)
• The tall, muscular man who was so hostile on sight of Jarissa last June is a member of a motorcycle gang whose business happen to cross Feral's path late in the night of this adventure. Business is discarded in favor of a mass attack. When the blond begins his transformation into a mountain lion-human hybrid, Feral stops frozen in shock for a moment: at last, she recognizes Puma. She thought him dead. Even when she could not remember much, Jarissa has been mourning someone these past two years. she only snaps out of it when one of the other gangsters slices her with a knife on ride-by.
  Puma is in no mood to listen. He cheers his team on even as he tries to sink his claws into the enemy's body personally.
  The running fight takes them through a series of NYC alleys, and leaves three corpses, before Feral manages to create a big enough motorcycle collision that she can vanish in the chaos.

Retro gets away empty-handed, vowing revenge.