Thunder strikes outside of the apartment building, briefly illuminating the obese Puerto-rican as he steps off the stairs to the ground floor.

Flashlight in hand, he directs its beam onto the electrical box. As he steps forward to it, seeing the many displaced and torn wires, he pushes his headband up further in a gesture of confusion.

Behind him, making nary a sound, Scott is creeping up. Crouched low, he unholsters and begins extending, section-by-section, his baton.

Clicking down on a button by its handle once he’s a breath away from the man’s back,, Scott powers the baton up. It begins emitting a crackling sound as sparks fly from it, and Scott stands.

Hearing this sound, the man whips around to Scott. Not a sound escapes his lips before the baton meets his neck, arcs of electricity jumping from it as the crackles intensify for a moment. The man falls to the floor, his body still spasming.

Scott clicks the baton’s power off, looking to the stairs the man’d come down from. Sighing as if in relief as he sees no sign of a reaction to their scuffle, Scott takes a moment to think to himself:

“Maybe I’m in over my head,” his mind rings, his eyes shifting to the pistol holstered in the man’s butt-pocket. His hand hesitates above it for a moment before snapping to the flashlight, which Scott pockets.

“I haven’t even stress-tested this suit! These guys could really, actually, kill me!”

Scott walks over to, and stops at, the foot of the stairway to the next floor. He opens his palms to his face, looking down at the flash-producers built into them.

“It all seems even more insane when I think about doing this all non-lethal.”

There’s a long moment where Scott looks up from his palms into the blackness above the stairwell, clenching his hands, slowly, back into fists as he does so.

“Hell, I’d die just to see them hurt after how they threatened my mom.”

Again, Scott looks over to the man’s holstered gun.

Outside, it begins to rain.

Up in Ranov’s bathroom, Yaga pulls a window just to the bathtub’s right open. In moments, they are barraged with rainfall, their dreadlocks flying about in the wind as they continue to stare at the blackened screens.

Ranov takes a step towards Yaga, having to raise his voice to talk over the new distraction. Yaga’s eyes narrow.

“And how am I to force him out?”, he bellows over the winds.

“What you always do when things don’t go your way…” Yaga replies, looking at him in the screen’s black reflection, the natural croakiness of their voice allowing it to sound clearly through the storm.

Ranov grimaces immediately, as if he’d expected such an answer. In a moment, the bathroom door has closed behind him.

“…hurt those closest to you.” 

Yaga looks down at their left hand, seeing a thick cast of bandages covering all but their fingers.

Many floors down, we hear club music bumping. The entire floor has their doors open, and lights on.

Each of the rooms houses its own group of three to four young hooligan-looking types, all seemingly aged from between fifteen to twenty and being of highly varying build. There are some much older ones, however, seemingly being from thirty to fifty years of age and being much more stockily built.

Only the older fellows can be seen with women among them, with all the younger ones being male. While the younger ones are louder and overall more energetic in their whiskey and video game-infused revelry, the old cats are keeping to themselves.

None of them seem at all perturbed by the blackout, going by the light of smartphones and cigarettes.

Though those in rooms further from the staircase don’t react much at all, the music competing with the gunshot that sounds from downstairs, some of those closer exit their rooms and look down it, right into the blackness.

A gaggle of younger men form there, hovering just before this darkness.

“Yo, shit, Andre went down there like, just a minute ago!” one calls out.

“Yo, Andre!” another yells down the staircase, the only response they receive being from right next to him:

“Woah, man, if you want his dick that bad, go get it!”

The original yeller is shoved forward, right into one of the stairway’s handrails.

“Yeah, sure, man,” he concedes frustratedly, drawing a beat-up looking pistol and turning towards the darkness. “But if this’s just some big-titted honey’s way’a finding a man in the boys, like Sonya did last month, that prize is mine, ya’ heard?”

At this, the gaggles of boys’ raucous banter is suffocated, and as soon as this first of them disappears into the black, a great deal of their number are loudly competing to be the second among them. As they go, nearly tripping over each other, they’re drawing knives and pistols.

Up on the building’s second-highest floor, we see Ranov, now having donned a t-shirt to go with his pajama-pants.

This floor, much unlike the one so far beneath, is entirely abandoned and silent. Moreover, every one of the floor’s windows are closed.

Flicking on a lighter to guide himself, Ranov makes his way purposefully to a specific apartment room.

Finding it unlocked, he immediately clicks it shut behind him.

Moving over to the room’s back corner, he shoves a fridge and a loose floorboard aside to access a sort of stash. In this crate-sized space, which he illuminates with his lighter, there is at least a year’s worth of whiskey, baking chocolate and hot chocolate mix.

He grabs a bottle of the whiskey, and shoves the board and fridge back into place.

Opening a cupboard above the fridge, he pulls out a shot glass, filling only a third of it with whiskey before setting the bottle aside.

Next, the shot in hand, he makes his way to what seems a closet adjacent to the kitchen. 

Opening it up, and bringing the lighter to a lantern in the room’s corner, he brightens up the whole space.

What is illuminated in the otherwise-empty closet now is the form of an all-but-naked young woman, likely no older than Ranov.

Her hair is overgrown enough to cover her face and chest as she hunches forward, bound to the wall at her wrists and ankles by metal bands. She is unnaturally pale.

Most notable among all her features, however, is the broken, yellow-tinted ring floating, seemingly supported by nothing, just above her head. A halo.

She does not look at Ranov. It’s hard to tell whether she even stirs at all. If she’s even still alive.

Ranov looks for a long time at her shadow-obscured face. He winces somewhat as he adjusts his pants.

He raises the shot of whiskey to the ring above her head.

“Just a small bit.” Ranov whispers to her.

After a moment of hesitation, he taps it against a broken end of the halo.

Slowly, a trickle of a glowing whitish substance trickles out of it, falling into the cup to mingle with the whiskey.

The contact leaves the halo ringing, as if it were metal, and it causes the girl to tense up. She sputters somewhat, as if in pain.

“Hey, hey– I took it, it’s alright now.” Ranov whispers, bringing a hand to her cheek. Before it can even touch, she’s bitten his thumb.

Tearing it from her teeth and exclaiming angrily, Ranov’s face tenses up.

He rears back to strike her, then stops. He allows his hand, bloodied thumb and all, to fall back by his side. His breathing is heavy with frustration as he blows out the lantern’s light and shuts the closet door on her.