sunday six

untitled and I forgot what I was doing with it but I want to share something:

Émilie's first sight of the so-called Heroes of Paris is when the girl with ragged black pigtails rises, leaning on the cracked glass of Gabriel's work table, and tries to climb to the main level of the atelier. The girl trips, sprawling, and swears in a language Émilie does not know, and she on her hands and knees crawls over smashed statuary and broken tile to the man on his, where he stares at the floor by the ostentatious portrait of Émilie, the gold-edged purple fabric of his suit shaking as he tries to breathe. With sharp motions she strips the rings from his fingers—Émilie does not have voice to question or strength to protest—and dons one and hands the black kwami thus summoned a crushed green macaron from the pocket of her torn pink jeans; Émilie doesn't hear her words, but they must be the kwami's name and the transformation command.

The Cat girl takes the earrings from the man's ears and the brooch from his neck, pinning the brooch to her own collar, and says something to Nooroo—whisper or shout, Émilie is unable to know—that sends the kwami rushing off. A silver baton swings from the Cat girl's hip: she takes it, splits it, and with a staff in each hand she rises: supporting her weight on one, she knocks Gabriel to the floor with the other, rolls him over, cracks him across the face hard enough to break bone.

The only other person in the room, Émilie sees when she collects the strength to lift her head, is a blond boy the Cat girl's age or a bit older, bruised and bleeding and chained down by a sentimonster shaped of interlocked rings; the Cat girl frowns at the ring she holds and the sentimonster moves away.