Xaviers!

The small area cleared around them because of their fight spares Wanda from the initial panicked rush of people making for the door, any door. She looks at the goings on, dumb-founded for the moment at what's happening.

Miriam Bell wrote:In the chaos she tries to keep her wits about herself enough to single out Will's mind and figure out how to adjust his shifting, but that's delicate work and she can't afford to put enough of her focus on it. She ends up just kind of vaguely sending jumbled thoughts and ideas to Will about silver.

Miriam fumbled with her mind, trying to access Will's shifting without the ten thousand complicated measures she used earlier...

..and then she felt something familiar grab and yank her. Metaphorically speaking, of course. And it all seemed so simple.


Her velvet gloves quickly shifted, mid motion, into ornately detailed and designed silver gauntlets.

Which is about when an increasingly hairy, thickening arm shoots out to try to grab Miriam by the neck.

Isolde has no trouble grabbing Miriam. Compared to her she's slow and weak. But she's also wearing silver gauntlets all of a sudden, with which she grabs at the arms holding her by the neck, digging her fingers deep into the fur and the skin underneath.

Wanda starts fighting the crowd, pushing towards Miriam and Isolde. At some point, she steps out of her shoes and getting through the crowd get marginally easier, but there's no way she's going to get to Miriam and Isolde quickly. "Stop it!" She yells at them, though it's hard to hear her over the general cacophany, even with their enhanced hearing.

Isolde lets out a pained yelp and tosses Miriam aside, her forearms smoking.

Miriam goes tumbling across the dance-floor until she skids to a halt against a wait-high wall. She half expects to have the wind knocked out of her and while it's certainly not pleasant she finds she manages to shakily pull herself to her feet. Not breathing had some advantages.

"Take a good hard look at what's simmering just under her surface." Miriam shouts over the general chaos that has broken out. "This is what she's talking about when she says she knows what she is!"

Wanda stalks towards Miriam, eyes flashing in anger, which even in the panic clears a small path for her. "And you don't think I don't know that? That I'm not aware of what she is?" She puts herself between Miriam and Isolde, actually turning her back on Isolde. "I make my own decisions. I'm not some child to be herded along as you or anyone else sees fit. If you can't see that, then I'm not sure how we ever would have meant anything to each other in the first place."

Behind Wanda, Isolde is making some frankly disconcerting noises as her form fluctuates between woman and wolf, her sizzling skin on her arms fitfully knitting back together.

"Herded? She's a monster that was out to get you not even a month ago! How are you not disturbed by this?"

The noises behind her cause Wanda to turn around. The sight of Isolde's shape fluctuating makes Wanda's brain skip a beat as she tries to process seeing it for the first time.

"Can't... nnhhrrr... can't think straight," Isolde chokes out through clenched, sharp teeth.

"We... we need to go."

"Yeah, she seems perfectly stable!" Miriam says, giving Isolde's mind another push now that she's a little further away and more people have cleared out. She slowly backs away herself although it's not really because of the werewolf. She's slowly realizing that in lashing out at Isolde she's hurting Wanda, but she finds herself unable to back down from the point she's trying to make.

Wanda's brain hiccup doesn't last long and she moves towards Isolde, "Yeah, we need to get you someplace safe, away from other people." As Miriam pushes her point, Wanda casts an unreadable glance in Miriam's direction.

"She... she lies!" Isolde says with a strangled growl, her form wrenching back towards bestial.

Miriam suddenly finds herself with five hundred pounds of wolf creature leaping towards her.

She probably should have seen this coming, but in a way Miriam has convinced herself of Isolde's beastial nature, so when she leaps for her specifically she's uncertain about what to do, stumbling backwards while calling out to Will for help. Protection of some kind, a way to better defend herself than some silver gloves that won't stop the mass of angry fur hurling itself at her while he raises her hands in front of her face.

Protection

Her gloves seemed to melt off of her hands and slide in front of her, rapidly enlarging into a silver scutum, emblazoned with the masks of comedy and tragedy. It was fairly sturdy and made of something repelling to werewolves, though it remained to be seen if Miriam could hold onto it when a 500=pound wolf was leaping at her.

Wanda's not expecting the leap and so she reacts a little slowly, but she gestures and a small tornado wraps around Isolde's legs, trying to give her some spin mid-leap. Wanda's brow furrows and her jaw clenches as she pushes her power hard to create even a little spin in a hurtling werewolf.

Isolde comes within inches of Miriam's shield, massive jaws snapping before she's yanked back by the whirlwind, sent skidding on her claws across the dance floor.

We should leave...

Miriam grabs the shield and pulls on it, fairly certain that she could not stand her ground against a full-blown tackle. But it should hopefully cover her retreat, even if it takes some effort to drag the shield and she's not going as fast as she would like.

After a couple scrapes along the ground, she suddenly found the shield moving...much more easily. It felt lighter in her hands, and less dense -- better for making a quick retreat, if not as good for defense.

"I'll handle her," she says to Miriam with just a hint of uncertainty, "she's my responsibility." She holds her hands up trying to looking placating while thinking about how ill-prepared she is to take on a werewolf.

Isolde bares her teeth, then backs up with a whimper, monstrous hands clutching her head.

"Make it... make it stop," she gnashes.

And with that cue, Miriam runs. None of this was right, but she has no idea what to do about it. She's not even really sure what exactly she's upset about. She'd wanted Wanda to be happy, but not like this? Not that she actually seemed all that happy, but she was trying to enjoy herself with somebody other than her. But she can"t really allow herself to be jealous after being the one to leave.

Wanda moves slowly toward Isolde, hands still out, relaxing a bit as she no longer has to worry about protecting Miriam. "It's okay. I'm here. We'll get you somewhere safe."

She hefts herself up to a crouch, her form wrenching and popping back towards human.

"...shouldn't have happened," she grunts.

"No, it shouldn't have. But she was kind of in your face," Wanda says, still trying to be more soothing than anything else. "Let's head out the back. I can't take you out the front like this."