Astrid shuddered and tried to make herself even smaller, her knees pressing tight against her chest. She could feel the grimy rust of the dumpster snagging coldly onto the thin fabric of her dress. The street was devoid of life and warmth, and the streetlamps in sight offered only the dimmest and most desolate reprieve from the night. She shivered again and was mortified when her jolt of fear caused her conduction wires to flicker briefly to life. Had she been seen? Her petite hands worried the hem of her dress as she tilted her head to the side, listening.

She saw the glow first, just barely skimming the edge of the dumpster. Scarlet, shifting, it swung slowly from side to side like a bloodied spotlight. It whispered across the asphalt from some ghosting source. Judging from its brightness, it was still quite a few yards away. But for how long? She could hear the whirring now, she was sure. The click of a lens. The hissing of static. Pistons and the hum of plasma. She shivered again. The street fell silent for a few more moments before it began to scream.

She would have covered her ears had she had them but the sound of metal shrieking against metal was piercing her mind directly and there was no means of muffling it. The light had stopped swinging, was focused now, was throwing a growing shadow of the dumpster that was swallowing both Astrid and the street stretching in front of her. She struggled to come to herself, her head ringing. He had found her. Her hands fumbled with an object about the length of her forearm and her thoughts fought to retrieve its purpose. What had she come out here for? What was following her? It was bad, she knew. She was trembling. A voice from the bells told her to run. She did.

Her shoes scraped against the asphalt and slipped lightly on the rain-slicked street. Her shadow twitched and writhed against the ground, trying to escape the feet it was chained to so that maybe it, as least, could avoid the bleak red light and the one casting it. Talons grazed against her back once, twice ? she felt her dress split and her blood flow, skin cleaving like butter under a diamond knife. The red light burned her. She could feel it searing her soul.

A hand slipped around her head and she screamed a final time, her bulb jumping to life with the shrill dying cry of a supernova. Then she shattered like glass.

END REPORT: NPC Astrid.Lucia DELETED FROM NETWORK.