The hollowed sound of a pair of feet waltzed upon the concrete walls of an otherwise silent stretch of urban back alley. Their echoing rhythm carried through the alley ahead of the soles responsible for their performance. But it wasn't a far distance; the watchful city pigeon, the only other inhabitants of the alley, would hear the footfalls mere seconds before witnessing the emergence of a solitary shadow, elongated by a chance angle of the dusk sun striking the figure that cast it.
Before a moment's passing, the figure would emerge in full view of the local wildlife. In plain view, the female figure came to quick, but calculated, stop near the side entrance of one of the old, dilapidated warehouses. With the ceasing of the young woman's footsteps, the alley fell silent, save for the muffled sounds of traffic on the street. An obvious look of frustration came over her. Pursing and swishing her lips, she riffled a hand through the right pocket of the beat-up leather coat she had acquired from a recent exploit. Though she spent a good few seconds digging, the truth was that the pocket only had one item comprising its contents: an equally tattered, folded-on-too-many-times cut of paper with barely legible scrawl marks arranged in a rough table format.
Still pursing and swishing her mouth around between her cheeks, the woman ran narrow eyes across the sheet. Several of the scrawled marks upon the paper had been scribbled out by her own hand, like a errand checklist. With the day nearly done, most of the items on the list were crossed out, leaving a single set of information at the very bottom of the sheet. It was this name that the girl's eyes wandered to, and immediately rolled at.
"Where do they come up with these people??" she mused in a mutter. She looked hesitantly around the alleyway, as though expecting some sort of fault or misdeed to strike out at her from some crevasse. "This is the right place," she told herself, still muttering. Looking back to the sheet, and its one item that remained unscribbled, she exhaled a soft, aggressively toned sigh. "After all of this I-- wait a minute." Somewhere from the alley behind her came another pair of footsteps, a bit louder and more resonant than her own. She craned her neck towards the sky, and released the paper from her hand, from where it floated down and onto the pavement. "Late!" she said. As always, Julia, you get held up at day's end.
She spun about on the balls of her feet and stopped in a gawk. The woman standing down the alley from her was not like anyone else she had dealt with before... and in her employment, she had dealt with some truly screwed up people. The woman she saw in front of her didn't even look like a person at all; the sleek, dark metallic form was nothing Julia was familiar with. If this is a joke...
Needing a stronger understanding of the 'person' she was now facing, Julia took a much closer look. Her vision of the electromagnetic spectrum sharpened, and the clarity made it all too obvious: the other woman was emitting electromagnetic activity that far surpassed that of any normal human. Whatever this was, Julia was certain she wouldn't be skating by as her usual self; she might actually have to break a sweat on her powers to take on this hit. Neural signals through her body and brain accelerated; the processing of her surroundings grew easier. "No hard feelings; just my job." In the throwing of a pointed index finger came a single static spark, which quickly shot forward in a bolt covering the gap between Julia and the metal-looking woman.
