@fcrvidus sent a [meme]:
“Tell me what happened to you. Let me help.”
Pidge wasn’t a fighter. She knew enough to get by and she could handle herself when needed, but she didn’t relish combat. She favored guerrilla tactics, ambushing when possible and dancing in and out of enemy reach when she had to face them head on. She balanced well with other paladins, playing the part of pesky irritant, distracting the enemy long enough for her friends to get in harder hits than she could manage on her own. Even her bayard honed in on her flighty tactics.
So when the paladins were separated and she was on her own, not even Rover by her side, she was having a hard time. Something was jamming their comms and she hadn’t had a moment of peace to bunker down and set to work rifling through the coding to fix it. She knew the others needed her for that. Hunk was probably trying-- if he wasn’t in the same situation as Pidge was.
This planet was swarming with sentries, creepy Galra machines that Pidge really wanted to take back to the castle and crack into. The thought of all that new tech to play with thrilled her, not to mention it would also be a great opportunity to find out if and how to disable whole squads of the robo soldiers at once. And that was a trump card she could have really used right about now.
The odds were stacked against her from the start: five on one. If things had been different maybe she would have been able to take them out sneakily one by one, but she’d turned a corner and come face to face with the sentries. After some effort, two fell to her bayard. But close quarters fighting was nowhere near her specialty. As quickly as she’d gained it, she was losing the upper hand. A shot from behind hit her in the back, right below the protection of the armor-- pain. Another hit her in the chest, thankfully not breaching the thicker armor there, but the force knocked her off balance to the ground.
She had to run. She knew she had to get away somehow. Her surroundings offered no good cover. Dammit. The most she could do was put space between herself and the sentries. She rolled onto her stomach, both hands clutching her bayard tight above her head. A flash from her bayard and the weapon shot outward, dragging her forward through the legs of a sentry once it had found an anchor point.
Something was burning through her system; her helmet’s HUD lit with a medical alert. The sentries’ weapons were alerted to subdue this planet’s lifeforms, which were much hardier than humans. And she was a small human. One shot and she felt like she’d been pummeled; it was hard to breathe and her muscles were seizing. Pushing herself to her feet, she scrambled around a corner, flimsy cover that would do no good once the sentries just walked over and--
Explosions? That noise was unmistakable. Those were the small detonations of sentries being destroyed. Pidge chanced a glance back around the corner.
“Keith.” She’d never been so happy to see the stoic paladin. At least neither of them was alone anymore. A good thing too because Pidge’s legs couldn’t hold her weight; she dropped to her knees, hugging herself. Her back burned--
Keith wasn’t asking questions when he neared her. She was grateful; she didn’t need a coddling touch.
“One of them got me.” The words came stilted and hard through clenched teeth. “I-I can’t see it.” A big part of her didn’t want to. It’s not that she was squeamish; she just wasn’t jumping at the chance to see potentially charred flesh. Despite the hurt, hurt, hurt, she pushed onward, knowing it was best to give as much information as she could. “It’s not just firepower; there’s some sort of neurotoxin-- Attacks the respiratory and muscular s-systems. Feels like a heart attack, b-but like if that was pulmonary not cardiovascular.”
