"I hope it doesn't come to that," he said, blushing a bit.  "My skills are necessary, but I hate to have to use them, y'know?  Take care, then, and I'll make a point of dropping by the Duchess later.  Just in case."<br/><br/>She could almost feel his eyes trying to caress her as she walked away, but soon she was lost in the crowd again.  Traffic seemed to be flowing strongly in one particular direction, and if she wasn't careful it pulled her along like a twig in the undertow, pulling her toward a marvelous wonderland of stalls and tents and sidewalk peddlers with their wares displayed on blankets for the curious and desperate.<br/><br/>Glancing at the paper gives her a beautiful action shot of a young girl, maybe in her late teens, with a bunny-ear headband, a denim jacket with a Nintendo-style mushroom mascot on the back, making a rude gesure at the camera with one hand and spraypainting something on the alleyway wall.  The prose, somewhere between tabloid sleaze-raking and jingoistic yellow press in tone, goes on at some length about a rash of youthful delinquents on a vandalism spree touting the superiority of chessboards and threatening the heretofore majestic calm of the proper order of things.  It also says something about a Mother When being most anxious to have these truants sent back to the High School, and her Ladies in Hating being hot on the trail of the worst offenders...<br/><br/>None of which really makes any sense.  But about that point, Kristen found that foot traffic had stalled and that some people in front of her were trying to back away from something up ahead.<br/><br/>Something very large, up ahead.<br/><br/>Something that sounded nice and violent and in desperate need of a smackdown.