Burn, Baby, Burn [Venezuela]

...he was running, wasn't he.

Flaming and furious, she came out of the gaps in the trees, only to be fairly certain that yes, her bastard of a neighbor was, in fact, running instead of facing her like a man. This was irritating. She didn't want to fight his actual army; she wouldn't get much done. The thing she mostly wanted to do was shoot Vicente in the face because he was burning her rainforests, you just don't do that! She couldn't get over quite how stupid this entire affair seemed, as Vicente's soldiers were put in considerable danger by the trees burning around them as well, Another plane swooped over the horizon, dropping more firefighting chemicals. The flames briefly receded.

See, it wasn't just as simple as it will grow back. This was a full-scale tragedy in Izalene's mind. Later, when she would learn that it was intended as a distraction, she would be furious, but she'd have to reluctantly admit it was a good distraction, if an absolutely horrible thing to do. She really had no choice but to address the burning forest instead of focussing on things like getting her navy in the water to defend the canal, because if she didn't, cities could get caught in the blaze, one her most valuable natural resources could be decimated, entire species could be shoved back onto the brink of extinction or even hit that point, and the forest, not used to rebounding from fires, could be scarred for a very, very, very long time. 

Even if it was a good distraction, though, that didn't mean that Izalene didn't think it was a completely asshole sort of thing to do that only people with no hearts or respect for adorable animals or for life in general would pull. So when she determined that Vicente had probably run, she was not exactly happy. She would have much prefered the boy come out and face her and man up for his actions, rather than run away like he could delegate responsibility to his men. This was a personal affront! An unwarranted attack! Idiotic in general!

Despite not really wanting them, before slipping away to chase after Vicente, Izalene made an annoyed huff and aimed her weapon at anyone who seemed to be actively instigating the fire. She wasn't certain how much she'd actually stopped, given that shotguns are bad at anti-armor but one of the most likely weapons to at least hit something, given their spread. She didn't check. As soon as they started firing back at her, she fell behind a tree and hid until the gunfire died down again. Hopefully that would at least slow them down a little? Probably not? She tried?

After that, she ran into the more unburnt section of the trees, looking back at a disaster that was slowly slipping out of both sides' hands. Why would they use fire as a weapon at this scale? It became hard to control after too short a period of time? Well, at least Izalene knew that Vicente, unlike herself, probably wouldn't run directly through the burning parts. Izalene had mostly done that because she'd end up with a few burns to treat no matter what she did today so may as well give them to herself, right? Vicente probably would not, so he was somewhere in this unburnt bit...

Oh wait! There he was! Coward holding the gun and trying to hide, yep, that was him! Izalene didn't say much by way of greeting this time. Instead, she fired a shell in his direction, once again hoping that the large spread of the shotgun would end up hitting the kid. "Covarde! Face me like a man! What must your men think? I can't imagine why they're even still here themselves!" she shouted at him. "You're the one poking a jaguar, so own up!" She loaded another shell and prepared to fire again, just in case the first one had missed completely.

Izalene really, really wished Vicente wasn't such an ass. Really, it was true! The main reason she wished that was because he was her neighbor and neighbors were easier to deal with when they didn't do things like burn your wonderful, biodiverse forest. She also had a different fury at him right now, though, because he was also Camila's brother, and Camila didn't need anymore insane psychological pressure on her at any point in time, ever. Fighting your brother, who also happens to be an asshole? That's way too much for the precious girl.

So it was with great satisfaction that Izalene heard she'd landed a hit. Alas, it wasn't quite the point-blank sort of hit that she was hoping for. Shotguns, since they shot a whole lot of pellets out of a shell rather than a bullet, could do some utterly horrifying damage at point-blank. Instead, it looked like he'd dodged fast enough that it only scraped up his shoulder. The blood told her another thing, too, though: he wasn't wearing that much body armor. Perfect. She could really mess him up if that was true. He was probably not planning on doing that much fighting, all things considered. She wasn't really sure why he didn't expect her to show up, but if he didn't expect it then he didn't expect it.

A moment later, though, she heard a loud noise and had only a second to react before she briefly felt a blinding-white pain. "Porra! Seu filho da puta!" she shrieked, just barely resisting her instinct to immediately grab her side where his rifle's bullet had sliced through it, though, instead just barely managing to keep her shotgun at ready and immediately firing back. She wouldn't blame herself, though, if that one had missed by a bit, considering that her left side felt like it was on fire and was probably bleeding pretty bad. She grimaced. Okay, he'd clearly at least had the presence of mind to grab a working gun while he ran away, then. Real obvious, that was now.

Almost immediately after that, Izalene realized that she really, really ought to get out of Vicente's line of fire now, no matter how angry she was at the boy, because revenge wouldn't be very effective if she was busy bleeding too much to take it. She dodged behind a tree. That's when she noticed what was wrong. Porra. As hard as her firefighters were trying, that fire was definitely traveling closer to Vicente and her's location. Was it more worth it now to cut her losses and let the little bastard go, and therefore avoid getting caught up in the inferno that she could already feel the increasing heat from, or was it more worth it to try to prevent Vicente from noticing that the aforementioned fire was getting closer and therefore get him burnt to a crisp in the flames?

It only took a moment's deliberation, plus about thirty seconds in which she tore some cloth off of her shirt and wrapped it around her side to stem the bleeding, for her to decide upon the latter. She reloaded, ducked back around the tree, and fired her shotgun at Vicente again before very quickly trying to hide again.

At least this fight seemed to be mostly going Izalene's way. Or, at least, that's what she'd interpreted so far, since Vicente hadn't shot another return volley at her. As long as she kept the advantage, she could probably make this one go exactly how she wanted it to. Or at least, she could make it go a little bit how she wanted to, which generally now involved catching Vicente on fire and seeing how he liked it. Of course, in this case, it would probably be a little bit more literal and brutal than what most people went for, but he was killing adorable poisonous frogs and cute birds and wonderful predators and little mice and all sorts of things! He had it coming!

...maybe she still needed to get her priorities straight. Priorities like "that bullet better not have nicked an artery but probably did". Also, priorities like "Vicente had it even more coming because he kept on advancing on Izalene's friends". Although, she'd sort already said that. She had plenty of friends that were animals. She liked animals. Despite being a social butterfly, sometimes it was easier with animals. They didn't try to shoot her! They might try to bite her a little, but that's what they were designed to do. People did things like, like set rainforests on fire, and say confusing things, and be unnaturally...

Oh god that injury was worse than she thought. She took another look at it, because a combination of smoke inhalation (a problem that she was not going to avoid, unfortunately, with the sheer amount of space Vicente was trying to take up with his flames) and blood loss was making her a bit more light-headed than she ought to be. She was definitely a bit light-headed to be trying to outrun fires. At least that wasn't her plan! It wouldn't be about outrunning it, it would be about outmaneuvering it and Vicente so that Vicente ended up in the flames and Izalene wound up out of them.

She grabbed some fallen branches off the ground. They were hot and brittle and all, but she'd use it to splint her injury, for now. Even if she burnt herself a bit with the charred wood, it would be better than continuing to bleed. She continued at this task for several precious seconds, feeling the increasing pressure against her arm with some relief. Good. So she still could do this fairly well on her own, then. The bits of clothes she'd torn away were already a bit mucky with blood. She didn't think he'd nicked a major artery, though. He probably didn't. Hopefully?

This would be about when Izalene realized that she wasn't just tying her arm into a splint with wood but with charred wood and that meant that she really had to look up about now! She did so posthaste, realizing suddenly that her skin suddenly felt a bit dry and OKAY THAT'S A LOT OF FIRE.

Well. Shit.

Okay. Time to take inventory. Quickly. Smoke inhalation, partially from the actual fire, partially residual damage that she would have sustained whether she'd come to the battlefield or not. Shoulder wound of undetermined badness. Vicente, who was probably also pretty badly hurt. Fire, which had, thanks to the whims of the wind and the structure of the rainforest, decided to advance from behind her instead of in front of her.

Had she mentioned that she thought setting things on fire was a stupid tactic? Because she'd quite like to emphasize that point about now.

After a few seconds, seconds crucially slowed by the combination of smoke in her lungs and blood from her shoulder robbing her brain of crucial oxygen, she decided the lesser of two evils was going to be running towards Vicente, because she was pretty sure the fire was surrounding her. This was ridiculous, because fire wasn't sentient, but she didn't really give a rat's ass about now. With a self-awareness in the jungle that could have only been bred by years of living there, she sprinted forward, closer to Vicente, gracefully leaping over obstacles as she slid around and tried to lift her shotgun and fire again, before suddenly being confronted with the fact that moving her shoulder was now beginning to make her vision swim and her head and her arm scream for her to stop. She quickly puts it down again. Well. For now, she'd just settle on running, not trying to do more damage to the boy unless they ran into each other properly, and also most likely literally.

Perhaps at some point in the future, Izalene figured that she and Vicente both would sit down and realize how much of an absolute trainwreck this entire battle had been so far. True, they were both relatively young, as far as a relative scale of Nation age went, but dear god was this a trainwreck. As she took a quick sprint away from the tree she was originally hiding behind to see fire suddenly fly up its branches, she realized that she couldn't use anything as an excuse for this. Absolutely nothing. She'd let the fact that she mostly just wanted blood get in the way of what she should actually be doing, which is getting that blood.

Also, she was pretty certain she wasn't thinking in proper straight lines anymore at this point, because that thought had been distinctly circular. Getting too distracted by her need for blood to actually get the blood? She was pretty certain she was missing a logical step or two somewhere in there. Whatever. The point was more along the lines of everything is on fire and she's now beginning to feel distinctly lightheaded, and she was pretty certain those two things were connected. Had she mentioned that she hated this fire? Because she was pretty certain that she'd never hated fire with a more burning passion than she did in this moment. Certainly, fire had never been her favorite thing, but by now? Fire was distinctly getting high on her list of "things I hate irrevocably".

Her arm still hurt, too, but she was, at this point, completely ignoring that. She had other things to worry about. Thinks like "where are the firemen?" She somewhat regretted going out to meet Venezuela, wherever this was, because she seemed to have chosen an area where the firefighting seemed to currently be at a minimum. This was probably because it was so close to the Venezuelan side of the lines. She hated that. She hated that Venezuela was sitting in her forests and on her land. She didn't care for technicalities, she just knew, bone-deep, that there was something there that wasn't supposed to be there and she wanted it gone.

She's not quite given that opportunity, but is given something close to it, when, like she predicted, she's not quite looking, her eyes are irritated and stinging, so she runs smack into the person she's supposed to be fighting. They're surrounded by fire on three sides, though Izalene is beginning to get the sinking feeling that the only side where they really aren't surrounded by fire is the canopy. This is mostly okay, since Izalene could probably get herself up a tree if necessary, but one of her arms is quickly moving out of the range of usability and the tree could easily catch fire, too, leaving her completely stranded and in a worse situation than before.

She can take some satisfaction when Vicente scrambles back, though, looking absolutely terrible. She's almost tempted to just shrug and tell him, "this is what you get." She's certainly not feeling much by way of sympathy. She wonders if she should drag this out, or just leave it as it is? He certainly deserves something pretty terrible... The fire creeps closer. Suddenly, smoke fills Izalene's next breath, and instead of actually doing anything to Vicente, she gives a burning cough. The area's range of vision is steadily lowering as smoke crawls in. It's mostly just wood smoke, but there's a distinct chemical flavor to it, thanks to the accelerants used in order to catch as much area as the Venezuelans thought they could keep track of.

Stupid stupid stupid stupid- She wants to say something appropriately witty, probably stinging, something memorable. Instead, still coughing, she nearly signs several obscene things at Vicente off of instinct, before being stopped by a shot of pain up her injured arm. And then, because she's not feeling particularly nice, she growls forward and kicks him. Hard. In a very particular place. Izalene knows capoeira. She's not using much of that, here, but she certainly knows how to kick things in very, very painful ways. "Seu bastardo idiota, olhe o que você fez!" she says, not actually caring that he probably only understands a bit of what she's just said.

She pulls out the shotgun to shoot him in the head and finish this, only to run into a pretty noticeable problem: one of her arms isn't bending quite right at the moment, and she can't get both onto the gun without subjecting herself to excruciating, white-hot pain. There's no way to fire the shotgun one-handed, either, not safely. And while she pretty much can't give two licks about safety at this point, she's not quite sure how to do it in a way that doesn't risk herself getting shot. So fine. She's going to have to get creative.

...or, looking at him, he might just bleed out without her having to do anything in particular, actually. A fate that she should probably be trying to avoid facing, too, because she's fairly certain that, even if her burning eyes are stinging and watering, the smoky forest, thick with terrible smoke that was even starting to make seeing Venezuela in front of her difficult, should not be spinning. And also shouldn't be so fuzzy. Nations don't technically have to breathe, but that doesn't mean oxygen deprivation isn't killing her, and wait, that doesn't really make sense, does it? She means, uh, don't Nations have to breathe just fine? Or something? Because the way her lungs are feeling right now definitely means "I need oxygen". Also, her head. It hurts, and she's also a bit dizzy. Though Vicente looks kinda funny with pricks of light around him whenever she tries to focus her vision on him.

The sky's not supposed to be grey, either and FOCUS. Izalene looks down at Vicente. He looks pretty terrified, and also like he's not going much of anywhere anytime soon. Right. She should focus on figuring out how not to get burned to a crisp, right now. She'd focus more on punishing the little bastard later. First, to find clear air, so that she stopped feeling so absolutely terrible. Except, well, in the meantime, something's hit her.

Yeah, they're definitely surrounded by the fire.

She looks down at Venezuela one more time, silently prays for a second, then decides that it would be better to climb a tree and found out that didn't help one bit than to stay here, so she tries to latch on to one. Except for her arm. It's killing her. And it's real hard to climb a tree one-handed, and she's going nowhere fast. "Maldição!" she shouts, though 'shout' is a bit of a strong word for the relatively weak sound that she makes. She tries to climb higher, anyway. It's been awhile since she's done it, but she could have, once, gotten up one-handed, and there's no reason she shouldn't be able to now! If only her head would stop trying to dump her off the tree sideways, is all, because while "up" is obvious, "backwards", "forwards", "left", and "right" are beginning to get a bit muddled.

Izalene didn't want to say that she was out of practice; her childhood had ingrained climbing trees and ducking through underbrush and running from things significantly faster than her and laughing and asking animals who couldn't talk back why people didn't just talk with body language, too, and all sorts of other things into her head. Right now, though, she was using her tree-climbing skills. And right now, she was realizing that trying to climb a tree with one arm out of commission and extreme difficulty keeping her balance might go a bit beyond her skills.

She wasn't certain she should be as dizzy as she was, but then again, Izalene hadn't exactly gone out of her way to end up in fires before, too. She wondered what that said about the state of the battle. Probably bad things. She probably should have talked with a few more of her generals and commanders before running out to shoot Vicente in the head, but she hadn't, and now she had no idea what they were doing, or how they were doing, or if the tree would stop being flecked with black stars.

She blinked. She immediately regretted it. It only seemed to spread the horrible stinging to more of her eyes, and in the moment she'd closed her eyes, she nearly felt like fainting. She threw her weight forward again, hugging it against the tree as best she could. She suddenly suspected that she might have chosen the wrong course of action, but what was she supposed to do? Stay on the ground and bleed out next to Vicente? Izalene didn't think so. Besides, she could probably patch up her arm better once she was in a safer place, but the first thing that had to be done was to get her out of immediate danger.

Would it be more dangerous to fall and break most of her bones, or to stay on the ground and get burnt up anyway? At least she felt like she was doing something, and climbing a tree was supposed to help her escape anything faster than her that moved across the ground. Izalene blinked, much faster this time, not wanting to feel another rush of dizziness. Yeah. She was pretty sure that's what she'd learned, but didn't that apply more towards things with legs? Fire moved pretty fast, but she was pretty certain that it could move up this tree, too...

She'd gotten basically nowhere, her head still hurting, the air still foggy, her head still a marshy mess, when she was fairly certain she saw Vicente get up and latch onto her idea, too- but maybe he'd already done that? She couldn't really tell. She shouldn't be looking any direction other than up right now, she didn't think, because she might have some double vision going on, and she just need to pay attention to the next foothold, the next place she could grab, let muscle memory do the work.

Over the roaring fire, she almost doesn't hear him. She can't make out what he's said at all, and if Vicente's looking, she's squinting, mouthing what she thought she saw, but clearly mostly unable to make out what he said at all from... somewhere above her? Funny, when did he get so fast? Alternatively, when did she get so slow? She coughs (she's been coughing this whole time, sending flares of blackening pain through her head, but she's also been ignoring it as best as possible), she blinks, squints, tries to figure out what's going on because everything's a dull roar and she wasn't looking directly at him- it's hard enough to tell what people are saying without seeing their lips normally, let alone when her head is rushing and there's a screaming fire below them.

Somewhere, she can see that he's reached and arm out to help her up. Izalene doesn't really think she should trust it, but everything's burning, burning, so she shelves pride for the moment, shelves distrust, shelves anger and attempts to aim at his waving fingers- not waving? That might just be her. She's probably only got one chance. She awkwardly pushes her injured arm into a place where it can catch her weight if she starts to fall backwards and lunges slightly to get her good arm onto Vicente's. She grabs his wrist and uses the boost to start getting higher.

"Obrigado," she shouts, but it sounds more like mumbling to her so she almost repeats it again, louder. She holds back, though, because she recognizes that her throat is beginning to sting and burn pretty badly, too. It never actually crosses her mind that she just thanked him in Portuguese, though, does not register that he might not know what she meant. She does know some Spanish (far more than she'd normally admit that she knows), but in the heat of the moment, it doesn't strike her that she ought to be using it.

Now she's just got to trust him not to drop her.

(Well, if she falls, it isn't like she wasn't about to fall any minute anyway...)

Izalene wasn't sure why Vicente was helping her. Her head might be a bit fuzzy, but she was actually quite certain she shot Vicente in the head, which would seem to preclude receiving help at all. They were also at war, and Izalene, loath as she was to admit it, might have actually dropped Vicente at the moment. Or at least, she would have, until he started practically dragging her up the tree, and may or may not have saved her from either falling to a painful death or burning to a painful death, despite the above factors.

Considering what she knew of Vicente, this was understandably a little bit confused. Then again, while they'd never liked each other much, they hadn't always been... Her head suddenly swam, and she suddenly held his hand in a vicegrip as the world swam into nothing and blackness for a moment while her head screamed in pain. The tree is tall, and she's still trying to balance herself with an arm that was injured enough to otherwise be completely useless. She just knew she had to go up. Trying to figure out Venezuela was making her head hurt, quite possible literally.

And then her head poked into clearer air. She gingerly and sorely slid herself onto a branch that she wouldn't fall off of and coughed violently herself, her eyes closed, her face screwed into a clearly pained grimace. She wasn't going to go much further. Even though she felt like falling over and she wasn't certain exactly what was going on, she did know that she wouldn't be able to climb any higher. Her arm was screaming and she was still dizzy and there was a burning feeling across her legs that may or may not have indicated she was worse off than she'd originally thought. She coughed again, the hacking nearly putting tears in her eyes. It wasn't going away.

After a moment, she opens her eyes. There's only the barest amount of smoke now, but her eyes still sting. There are flames everywhere else, and she's pretty certain her eyes aren't entirely tearing up just because she's got smoke in her eyes. Not that she'll say that out loud. She chokes out more coughs. It's not going away. She can see the planes flying by overhead. It did not seem to be working as well as she'd like. Of course, at this point, Izalene was just waiting for the rain. The rain wouldn't end the fire, not completely. But the rain would come, and the rain would help, and she could manage the rest.

She didn't feel like moving. She tried for a moment, but her head swam again and she grabbed on to the nearest thing, preventing herself from falling over. This was a disaster. She couldn't hear anything, not over the crackling fire. She could hear that. She could hear that everywhere. Suddenly, she remembered who had dragged her up here. She looked Vicente directly in the eyes. It was possibly a little unnerving. She wasn't blinking much and her facial expression was some mixed of very much in pain, very distressed, very confused, somewhat angry, and completely blank. But she needed to see him. If she could see anything properly. Everything was a bit blurry.

She takes her non-injured arm and signs the one-handed 'thank you', her flat palm's fingers touching her forehead and bringing her whole hand down and forward. "Obrigado," she shouts again, just in case he didn't hear in the first time. She remains looking at him. She's not going to look down for now. She hates having one of her arms injured. It makes everything difficult, including communication. It was like someone had taped half of her mouth shut. She didn't feel comfortable that one of her arms didn't have a high enough range of motion to sign anything.

She supposes she's just going to wait out whatever happens from here, then. That would be okay. Her head hurt anyway, and she was thinking through molasses. She thinks for a moment before carefully trying to tear up more of her clothes to re-tie her makeshift sling, so that maybe she can just cut off blood flow to the injury altogether in a splint. It would at least stop hurting, then, and also less risk just bleeding out. On the other hand, since it was her shoulder, it would make her entire arm completely unusable, and therefore making balancing herself on the way down again next to impossible.