Nico was 'woken' for her shift, except she wasn't truly conscious. She spoke in a dazed manner and took her position, unmoving, for ten minutes. Then she took the book, the lighter fluid and a lighter before going into another living room to set the book afire. She watched it burn. She only woke from her sleepwalker's trance when she heard an unfamiliar voice behind her ask: "Isn't it a bit dangerous to burn that in here?"
She whipped around and leapt up, suddenly awake. A man stood behind her with scruffy brown hair, a suit and Converse sneakers. Shocked by the sight of him, she promptly pulled the trigger on her carbine and ... click. The safety was on. She felt a little ashamed for her trigger happy ways - he could have been human, after all - but was mostly ashamed for forgetting to take the safety off.
"Why did you burn the book?" asked the stranger, nonplussed.
Her team mates woke up and came forward, training guns on him. He seemed utterly unafraid, which worried her.
She demanded to know who he was and why had neither pack nor weapons.
The stranger ignored her questions and instead warned her about the dangers of the fire. She stomped it out and started casting a banishment ritual at him. SInce it took a minute a roll it wasn't the quickest form of anti-demon assault but it seemed to do the trick. With a perturbed frown, he stepped through a doorway and disappeared.
The team fled with their packs, keeping the meteorologist in the middle as they clustered around him. They kept glimpsing the stranger in different spots along the street but when they fired they didn't manage to hit him. Those eagle-monkey hybrids were attracted to the sound and settled down on the rooftops. At one point, the demon dropped the diary, now intact and unburnt, from a rooftop as though taunting her.
An earthquake swept the street, knocking most of her team mates flat and sending the eagle-monkey hybrids flying off in fright.
Nico muttered to Jack to get ready to grab the lightest person in wolf-form and flee. She'd try to cover him. On the count of three, he shifted to Urshul and picked up a terrified Rochelle, throwing her onto his back where she clung for dear life. Then he fled, leaving Nico and Johnny and the meteorologist behind. She started desperately trying a banishment - though she knew it would take too long - and started pouring lines of lighter fluid around herself, getting her pals to chime in after her chant (in this case, the Lord's Prayer since they were unlikely to know any other).
She also warned them to run when she said so, further splitting them for safety since a running gun battle wasn't doing anything. As she told them to go, the ground churned beneath her feet, sinking her down to her ankles and hardening. The other two fled in opposite directions but she was trapped.
And the Stranger approached her once more, wanting to know why ... why she had attempted to burn the diary.
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